TO: Superintendents, Principals, Business Managers, School Boards, VSBA, VSA, VPA
FROM: Secretary Rebecca Holcombe, Ed.D.
SUBJECT: Statewide Longitudinal Data System, Update Fall 2017
DATE: November 7, 2017
The Vermont Agency of Education (AOE), through funding from a 4.9 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Education, is in the final stages of developing and implementing a Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) to support the work of the AOE and Vermont school districts. A significant portion of the federal award supports the creation of a system to automate education data submissions to the state from Supervisory Unions / Supervisory Districts (SU/SD), known as Vertical Reporting.
The SLDS is intended to enhance the ability of Vermont to efficiently and accurately manage, analyze, and use education data. The SLDS should help all Vermont education stakeholders to make data-informed decisions to improve student learning and outcomes; as well as to facilitate research to increase student achievement and close achievement gaps. The SLDS also supports state and federal reporting requirements.
Since the project started in the fall of 2014, AOE has been working closely with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) on the following:
- Design and build of secure development, test and production environments.
- Analysis and migration of historical education data.
- Analysis and design of the Vertical Reporting process.
- Analysis and alignment of other AOE data sources for inclusion in the SLDS.
- Development of technical specifications.
- Preliminary contact with Student Information System (SIS) vendors.
- Preliminary contact with SU/SD technology staff.
This memo is to alert you, as a stakeholder, that we are entering implementation phase for the SLDS.
The AOE, in collaboration with HMH and SIS vendors, will be deploying the SLDS at the SU/SD level through a tiered approach over the next eight to 12 months.
Read the full SLDS Update Memo.