The Addition and Implementation of Prior Year Reporting

Introduction

In the past few years, districts have expressed the need to report completions earned in the prior year when circumstances prevented those completions being reported in a timely manner. For example, a student passes the GED but the test results are not made available to the district until the reporting window is closed for the year. The district cannot report the completion in the next year as that student is no longer enrolled.

House Bill 769 has stipulated that the funding process used for the districts more closely emulates that of the community colleges. This, coupled with requests from members of the Workforce Education District Data Advisory Council (WEDDAC) for the ability to report prior year completions, prompted Community College and Technical Center Management Information Services (CCTCMIS) to examine the difference between the two systems. We found that the community colleges have the ability to report completions from the year prior to the current reporting year. CCTCMIS then examined what changes would be necessary to allow the districts to do the same, as completions directly affect performance based funding.

This has been a topic of discussion at WEDDAC meetings, and, at the last meeting, the group agreed to the following changes and requirements in order to implement reporting of prior year completions. What follows is an outline of the process that should aid the districts in implementing these changes.

Data Element

A new data element has been created in order to indicate that the record contains a completion earned in the prior year. Only completions for the previous year are valid, so the data element is also an indicator of the year the completion was earned. The new data element, Prior Year, is four bytes long and numeric; see <"Prior Year> for the complete definition.

Formats

The new data element has been added to the three formats that are used to report completions and related data:
Adult Student Course - LCPs;
Vocational Student Course - OCPs and Vocational Credential, Other; and
End of Term Status - Diploma or Certificate of Completion. See attachments for changes to these formats.

To send a valid set of student data for a prior year completion, all formats must be sent except for Teacher Course. A Teacher Course record would not be required, as the student is not enrolled in the current year. The edit process has been adjusted to ignore this requirement if the value of Prior Year is greater than zero.

Edits

The new data element requires a new edit as follows:

26. Prior Year must be numeric. If it is greater than zero, it must be a valid WDIS Reporting Year and must be one year prior to the current valid WDIS Reporting Year. –record rejected-

Just as when reporting a current year completion, data in all three formats must meet all current year edits and validations in order to be accepted for use in reporting. This includes cross-format edits, which require the data to agree over District, School, Student Identifier, Year, and Survey. Also, Grade Level must agree between the End of Term and Demographic records. The one exception to meeting all edits is the edit which requires a matching Teacher Course record for the Adult and Vocational Course records.

When building a student record with prior year information, the Survey and Year fields must contain the current survey and year being submitted.

On-Line Data Entry

The Prior Year data element will be available for update in the on-line system. When updating the value on-line, all above edits will apply.

Building the Records

The data used in the fields that are relevant to the prior year data must, of course, come from the prior year. This includes the OCPs and LCPs earned, as well as diplomas and certificates. However, there are other data that are used in reporting completion which also must be for prior year. These data elements include:

Vocational/Adult General Education Program Code
Course Number
Grade Level
Cost Reporting Code
Vocational Credential, Other
Vocational Basic Skills Examination
Adult Educational Functioning Level, Initial
Vocational/Adult General Education, Disability, Student

Changes in programs must also be taken into account, but there is an overlap – usually of at least one year - between notification and implementation of such changes. If a program is scheduled for deletion in an upcoming year, the district must assume the responsibility of reporting any completions for that program before it is deleted.

Data Transfer

The addition of this function will not change how the data is transmitted. Districts will send the same file names, and have the same transmission windows; there will be no supplemental files.

Data Usage

OCPs, LCPs, Diplomas and Certificates sent in prior year records will be included in counts on Comparison Reports run for the current survey and year.

The data sent in prior year records will be counted as completions only and not counted towards enrollment. For example, for Perkins reporting, these data would be used for Perkins Measures 1A1 numerator, 1A2 numerator, 2A1 numerator and denominator, and the 4A2 numerator and denominator, but would not be included in the rest of the measures which count enrollments.