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California School Information Services (CSIS)

Contains information about the funded initiative to transfer student records electronically from participating school districts and to allow state reporting from electronic records.

The California School Information Services (CSIS) program is a statutorily authorized local educational entity with the mission to:

  • Build the capacity of local educational agencies (LEAs) to implement and maintain comparable, effective, and efficient student information systems that will support LEA daily program needs and promote the use of information for decision making by school, district, and county staffs.
  • Enable the accurate and timely exchange of student transcripts between LEAs and post secondary institutions.
  • Assist LEAs to transmit state reports electronically to the California Department of Education (CDE), thereby reducing the reporting burden of LEA staff.
  • Assist LEAs to assign and maintain Statewide Student Identifiers (SSIDs).

The CSIS program office is under the administrative oversight of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which is operated from the Kern County Office of Education. The CSIS program and the CDE collaborate on a number of projects including the following:

California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS): CALPADS is the foundation of California’s K-12 education data system. It will maintain longitudinal, individual-level data including student demographic, program participation, grade level, enrollment, course enrollment and completion, discipline, state assessment, teacher assignment, and other data required to meet state and federal reporting requirements. Data will be linked longitudinally using a unique, non-personally identifiable SSID. CALPADS implementation is projected to occur in 2009-10. The CDE and CSIS are collaborating in the development of CALPADS. CALPADS is a CDE system but CSIS will provide technical assistance to LEAs and provide system maintenance. Visit the CALPADS Web page for more information.

Statewide Student Identifiers (SSIDs): Each K-12 student in a California public school must be assigned an individual, yet non-personally identifiable, SSID. LEAs are required to acquire and maintain SSIDs. CSIS assists all LEAs to acquire and maintain SSIDs. To maintain the SSIDs all LEAs must submit an Annual SSID Maintenance each fall. The CDE uses enrollment counts from this submission as the LEAs official enrollment. Participation in this program is mandatory. Visit the SSID Web page for more information.

CSIS State Reporting Program: LEAs participating in the CSIS State Reporting Program transmit five state reports through CSIS to the CDE. The five state reports include: the California Basic Educational Data System (CBEDS) reports which includes the County District Information Form, the School Information Form, and the Professional Assignment Information Form, the Language Census, and the Student National Origin Report (SNOR). Participation in this program is voluntary and is limited to existing participating LEAs because the program will transition into submitting data directly to CALPADS. LEAs not participating in the CSIS State Reporting Program may participate in the Best Practices Cohort (described below) to prepare them to submit data directly to CALPADS. Visit the CSIS State Reporting Web page (Outside Source) for more information.

Best Practices Cohort: CSIS administers the Best Practices Cohort grant program designed to build local data management practices and infrastructure to prepare LEAs to collect, maintain, report, and validate student- and teacher-level data to CALPADS. This program will be available to LEAs not participating in the CSIS State Reporting Program. Participation in this program is voluntary, and subject to available funding. Visit the Best Practices Cohort Web page (Outside Source) for more information.

CSIS State Reporting

Currently, 256 of approximately 1,056 LEAs participate in the voluntary CSIS State Reporting program. The state reporting program essentially moves LEAs from submitting aggregated reports to the state to submitting individual-level data elements to CSIS that are then aggregated into required state reports. This move requires the standardization of individual data elements, which will eventually allow for the electronic transfer of data that can be aggregated into many state reports and the electronic transfer of student records between districts and to postsecondary institutions.

LEAs received one-time "incentive" funding of $8.51 per enrolled student to support start-up costs. Funding to support new cohorts of CSIS State Reporting districts is no longer provided because in 2009-10 all LEAs will be submitting student- and teacher-level data directly to the CALPADS. LEAs that do not participate in the CSIS State Reporting program are eligible to participate in the Best Practices Cohort (Outside Source). These LEAs will receive one-time funding of $8.51 per enrolled student to support specified deliverables designed to prepare the LEA to submit data to CALPADS.

Participating CSIS State Reporting LEAs use one of 12 available Student Information Systems (SIS) that meet CSIS requirements to maintain data on their students, staff, and institution. LEAs fill in and maintain the required elements in these database systems according to CSIS requirements. The CDE and CSIS staff members work together before a data submission cycle to define the required data elements, and the rules for combining individual student, staff, and institution data into state reports. At predetermined times, participating LEAs electronically submit required data elements to the CSIS program office. CSIS works with the LEAs to clean and prepare their data for submission to the state.

CSIS transmits aggregated and validated LEA data to the CDE according to a predetermined schedule and requirements. The CDE then combines all the data (CSIS LEA data and non-CSIS LEA data) to produce consolidated state and federal reports. In the first year that an LEA submits data through CSIS, it must also submit the same reports in the traditional manner. The CDE conducts comparability tests by requiring the LEA to analyze both their traditional CDE data submission and data submission through CSIS to the CDE. After the traditional and CSIS data submissions are compared, the LEA determines what changes need to be made to address any problems, and is satisfied that future data submissions through CSIS will accurately reflect the district’s information for meeting the data submissions reporting requirements. When comparability is achieved, generally after the first year, LEAs submit data only through CSIS.

More information can be found on the CSIS Web site (Outside Source).

CSIS State Reporting 2008-09 Submission Cycle

Fall 2008 Submission Cycle

Approximately 250 LEAs will submit production CBEDS and SNOR data through CSIS to the CDE in fall 2008. Below are some of the documents used for fall reporting.

File Creation Parameters and Aggregate Validation Rules

File creation parameters are intended to provide a clear set of rules and specifications for creating the required CDE aggregate files for the SNOR and CBEDS submitted by LEAs. These documents are under strict version control and are updated and released simultaneously with new releases of the CSIS Data Dictionary, Code Tables, Validation Tables, and File Formats.

The following SNOR file creation parameters for 2008-09 may be viewed online at the CSIS Web site:

SNOR file creation parameters (DOC; Outside Source)

The following CBEDS Forms for file creation parameters for 2008-09 may be viewed online at the CSIS Web site:

CDIF file creation parameters (DOC; Outside Source)
PAIF file creation parameters (DOC; Outside Source)
SIF file creation parameters (DOC; Outside Source)

Tools/Resources

Crosswalk for Deleted 2008 CBEDS Assignment Codes (XLS; 31KB; 4pp.)

Assignment Code File 2008 (XLS; 146KB; 22pp.)
This file contains a listing of all CBEDS assignment codes, indicators for each assignment code indicating whether or not certain elements are required to be reported for each assignment, and an indicator of whether or not the staff assignment code is allowed to not match the student course code.

Frequently Asked Questions

CSIS: CSIS Frequently Asked Questions (Outside Source)

Correspondence/Newsletters

The letters below provide information about the Annual Statewide Student Identifier Maintenance submission, State Reporting, and other data activities.

State Reporting Letters
Annual Statewide Student Identifier Maintenance Letters
CDE Education Data Newsletters

The newsletters below provide information about updates regarding CALPADS, SSID, State Reporting, and related subjects.

Funding

One-time funding is available to eligible LEAs, and very limited ongoing funding ($0.25 per enrolled student) is available for eligible LEAs to support SSID maintenance. Visit the Local Assistance Funding Web page for more information.

The CDE continues to advocate for more adequate ongoing funding to support LEA activities related to maintaining SSIDs, and collecting, maintaining, reporting, and validating student- and teacher-level data. The CDE has requested funding in the past three years, and sponsored legislation in the past two years. The CDE has requested ongoing funding to support local data activities in 2008-09.

Contact Information

Staff Contacts - CALPADS Operations Office Staff.

Questions:  CALPADS Operations Office | cdecsis@cde.ca.gov | 916-324-6738
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