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1st Quarter - 2004
Nevada - Department of
Education
775-687-9154
Jack McLaughlin - Nevada Superintendent of
Schools jack@nsn.k12.nv.us
Frank South, Director - 755-687-9141
fsouth@ncn.k12.nv.us
Cindy Lou Little - Systems Manager - cindyl@nsn.k12.nv.us
In the Fall of 2003, the Nevada DOE issued an RFP for
the improvement of their educational data base:
The Nevada Education Database (NED) is the
name of the statewide project for the transfer of individual student
educational record data from the 17 school districts to the Nevada
Department of Education (NDE).
There are eight school districts using Pearson’s SASIxp, five
districts using Chancery’s WinSchool, three on Apple’s PowerSchool,
and one on Pearson’s CIMS product. There are approximately
370,000 students enrolled throughout the state with Clark County
School District having the largest enrollment (approximately
257,000). Almost
95% of students within the state are in SASIxp school
districts. Each school
district utilizes the flexibility of their respective system to
determine the placement and coding of their data. Nevada’s experience is that
extracting data from these local student information systems (SISs)
has been problematic.
The extracts used to meet state requirements are
impractically time-consuming, unduly complicated, require constant
maintenance, and must be regularly re-designed to accommodate
changing NED standards.
The Nevada Department of
Education (NDE) requires the services of a qualified vendor to
design and deploy a web-based, standards-focused, data
collection/mining system to pull individual student record data from
the local school district SISs into a web-addressable, School
Interoperability Framework (SIF) compliant, statewide student
information database.
The solution must accommodate the four SISs and the different
configurations and processes used by the 17 districts and must
address the movement of data from the local SISs into the state file
structure and coding requirements. The extracted data must be
formatted to be SIF and XML compliant.
The 1st Phase of the contract was awarded to Otis
Educational, Inc, with TetraData as a subcontractor and work on the
contract will begin in January 2004.
The solution must address the
movement of data from the local SISs to database structures that
meet the state’s standards for file and code structures and the
structure of the data sets must be SIF compliant and XML
formatted. The solution
may suggest a direct capture of the data from the SIS tables and the
development of SIF agents.
In addition, the solution must address, but not be limited
to:
● Comprehensive Data
Modeling
● Maximizing processing
speed
● Flexibility of system
to accommodate new data elements and codes
● Data integrity and
cleansing
● Easy crosswalking
function
●
Secure web-based access to authorized users
● Creation of Ad
Hoc Web Reports using the extracted data
● Providing a
mechanism for longitudinal research
● Ability to
Satisfy state and federal reporting (e.g., NCLB,
SB1)
● Data security to
create, update, and access data via the web
● Large volume
data sets ● Ensure compatibility with the existing Statewide Database components ● Ability to extract data based on a user-determined date or pre-defined schedule ● Developed products must not require that local SISs be impaired or inoperable before, during or after extraction process
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