The purpose of this memo is to provide an update on the progress we are making, as a state, in completing this year’s DC#04 SY19 Year End Data Collection using the Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) Vertical Reporting (VR) process. Last school year, the final school district and supervisory union (SU/SD) submissions were not completed until April of 2019. This year, we have made significant progress in streamlining the submission process, and as of October 29, 2019, only one district has not completed the year end official data collection, which is the largest and most complex of the VR data collections.
This is a significant improvement, worthy of recognition. Vermont’s SU/SDs continue to work hard in partnership with the Agency of Education (AOE) and our vendor to complete the necessary collections in a timely way. We are also making adjustments to enable a smoother submission process.
While the DC#04 SY19 submission timeline is greatly improved from last year, it is not yet complete. Data collected in the DC#04 collection are used to generate metrics for Vermont’s Annual Snapshot, complete federal reporting and support school finance calculations such as Average Daily Attendance, which is a key metric in the calculation for Allowable Tuition.
As a result, we have made the difficult decision to delay rollout of the Vermont School Climate Survey (also known as VTCLIM) indefinitely. We have concluded that adding a new data collection at this time would create too much additional work for both school districts and the Agency and would negatively impact our collective capacity to be successful in other high priority data work.