California District Chooses Software To Help Comply with State Reporting Requirements

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Berkeley Unified School District in Northern California has chosen Certica Solutions' K-12 data reporting software Certify to help record and verify data in order to comply with California's extensive and demanding requirements for gathering and submitting student, teacher and school evaluation data several times each year.

The state's primary data collection system is California State Information Services, and in addition to data reporting requirements, CSIS has literally dozens of verification requirements to check for errors and to definitively measure quality. Certify is designed to reduce the time demanded to meet such requirements.

The company is also preparing Certify to verify data for planned data collection systems California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS) and California Longitudinal Teacher Integrated Data Education System (CALTIDES).

In addition, BUSD is also using the software to ensure the quality of data in its current student information system, Pearson's SASI, with a view toward implementing Pearson's PowerSchool in time for the 2009-2010 school year.

"Given that data migration is usually the single hardest aspect of transitioning to a new administrative application, we believe that a rigorous, pro-active assessment of our student data in SASI will put us in a better place to make the move to PowerSchool," said Jay Nitschke, BUSD's director of technology. "By identifying potential data errors and correcting them in SASI, we're giving ourselves a leg up on getting PowerSchool in place on time and on budget."

About the Author

Scott Aronowitz is a freelance writer based in Las Vegas. He has covered the technology, advertising, and entertainment sectors for seven years. He can be reached here.

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