SACRAMENTO — In keeping with his commitment to reduce bureaucracy and enhance assistance to local educational agencies, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell today unveiled substantial improvements to the California Department of Education's (CDE) Web site.

The newly restructured Web site is now more dynamic and increases accessibility to users. The changes are designed to streamline CDE operations, present better quality of information, and eliminate duplicative data. Also, an enhanced "Funding Opportunities" link is designed to help educational agencies more easily learn about and apply for funding. The Web site also has a link to its emerging Data Resource Guide that allows users to search for specific data products produced by CDE.

"The technology improvements are aimed at reducing the bureaucratic burden on our local educational agencies, and increasing our productivity and accountability to our students that I believe will save taxpayer dollars," said O'Connell. "This will help schools and districts focus more attention on their most important responsibility, which is educating our students."

The new Web site (California Department of Education [http://www.cde.ca.gov]) is designed with a more streamlined structure and consistent appearance that is more user friendly and navigable by topic instead of CDE division. Material is categorized by curriculum and instruction, testing and accountability, professional development, finance and grants, data and statistics, learning support, specialized programs, and resources. Regular users of the Web site may need to change their "favorite" bookmarks to match the new site. To help users locate Web documents, there is a new "smart" search engine, an A-Z index covering all topics, and a dynamic site map.

CDE's "Funding Opportunities" link (Funding - Finance & Grants [http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fo/]) helps educational agencies learn about and apply for more than 150 state and federal grants administered by CDE. Information is presented in a standardized format with downloadable requests for applications and proposals. There is a free subscription service to automatically advise users by e-mail of new funding opportunities. There are already nearly 16,000 subscribers. New features will soon be added including all funding opportunities projected for the fiscal year, improving the coherence of requests for applications and proposals, and soliciting funding opportunities from agencies other than CDE. Ultimately, the system will contain historical fiscal data and will allow a school or district to track its unique status in the funding process.

CDE's new Data Resource Guide (Data Resource Guide [http://inet2.cde.ca.gov/dataresourceguide/]) is a dynamic tool that allows users to search an online catalog of about 200 CDE data products by keyword, subject, type of data, date, as well as other criteria. The search will produce a list of data products, including information on school, district, program-related data collections, databases, and reports. The information will include a description of the data product, deadlines for submitting information, legal requirements, contacts, and associated Web links.

Editors Note: The new Web site also contains an expanded "News Room" (Newsroom [http://www.cde.ca.gov/nr]) link to assist news organizations in covering important events, finding media advisories, news releases, speeches, biographies, audio, and video.