Alumni type

This is a request to add an alumni person-type to the TPDM, or to find another clever solution to this issue we face, as described below.

When candidates leave our program as completers, we may or may not be able to track them. Some keep in contact, others don't. However, when we get back K-12 achievement data, sometimes we are surprised to learn that a completer is still in the field teaching, or perhaps even serving as a school leader.

Here's an example of how this actually happens:

• We have a long-standing relationship with a network of schools or a small district, we have coordinated with them for years and have placed teachers in their schools for a long time
• Each year, we send them a list of our completers and they provide us back with data on those completers (if they have those completers working within their network/district)
• The data file is passed back, and includes information about some completers with whom we have lost contact
• One example of the kind of data we get back is 'years of experience', which is information we don't have ourselves. We also might also learn that our completer is now a school principal. There is no domain in the TPDM for us to capture this new (and valuable) information about the roles of our completers in the field.

Because are thinking/operating as a teacher-prep program, we view completers in the field as alumni, not staff (Ed-Fi Core). In fact, we often struggle to crosswalk school IDs from these data files with the National school IDs (NCES), and we thus don't have the necessary ed org information to link our completer person-type to the school in which they work as a staff member. We just know that they used to be in our program, they finished, and now we have some information about them thanks to MOUs and partnerships with local networks/districts.

This request is to find a way to capture that additional information for the completer without needing to know the ed org and other required information for their role as a staff member at a school, which is not how we conceptualize them anyway.

Thank you