Kinetech is looking for select school districts to help solve the multi-million dollar challenge created by TEA’s PEIMS requirements. This article outlines the current problem, challenge, process and our PEIMS solution. Read more if you are looking to streamline your PEIMS reportings and receive the maximum funding for your district / campus.
Problem:
PEIMS reporting costs Texas schools between $40 and $100 Million dollars per annum.
At last count there are over 1200 school districts in the State of Texas serving over 5 Million students. To comply with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) each district and as a result each campus, must submit student demographic, attendance, and other information to the Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS). This is commonly called PEIMS reporting and is required quarterly with 2018 dates being:
- Fall (Collection 1):
- Midyear (Collection 2):
- Summer (Collection 3):
- Extended Year (Collection 4):
Each district has dedicated resources to manage these quarterly reports. If every district had one full time employee working on these reports, they likely have many more, then the annual cost would be (on the lowside) $42,000,000 per annum ($35k salary *1200 Districts). This does not include the cost of Student Information Systems (SIS) or other IT resources used to support this process.
Challenge:
There are several challenges that must be addressed to tackle this problem. Specifically, strict standards from the TEA must be adhered to such as the Texas Education Data Standards (TEDS). In addition, the system must adhere to the XML framework defined by the state to upload records to the Education Data Warehouse (EDW). Furthermore, existing student information systems (SIS) present problems in collection, reporting, and quality. Finally, districts must adhere to legal requirements and cutoff dates to ensure they receive the maximum amount of funding for properly reporting on their constituency.
Current Process:
The current process adhered to by most school districts is as follows:
- Users create a TEDS-compliant extract from their local information system and save it locally.
- Then open the Validation Tool and point it to the extract. Users can validate multiple files for the same school year and collection at the same time.
- The tool checks the selected extracts for all errors and creates a report that identifies the issues with the data in the extract. Users can print the on-screen report, filter it by error type, or download the complete report as a CSV file.
- Then users fix the data in their local information systems and repeat the process as often as needed.
This process is tedious, manual, and monotonous. Errors are not aggregated by row. Coordinators cannot edit the errors directly in the validation tool. The corrected file must be re-validated and the process repeated.
The Way Forward:
Kinetech is currently partnering with select districts and SIS providers to build a bridge (direct integration) between their SIS, our PEIMS SaaS solution, and the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) Education Data Warehouse (EDW). The solution will cost effectively and intuitively assist PEIMS coordinators sanitize, code, and report their data saving thousands of dollars and countless hours / year.
