By Christopher Fletcher, KSDE IT team 

The Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) continues to move forward with the modernization of the state longitudinal data system (SLDS) through the implementation of the Kansas Education Data System (KEDS).  

To date, districts and private schools have been very responsive by taking steps to prepare their districts to transition to this new system. Of the 345 private accredited/public systems in Kansas, 162 have received their key and secret combination. This allows them to begin working with their student information system (SIS) vendor to connect their SIS to KEDS and configure the items necessary for this new submission system. 

Staff from across the state have been attending the four unique presentations offered by the KEDS team. For the month of November, there have been more than 600 registrations for the KEDS training sessions. The KEDS team is grateful for the enthusiastic response from school and district staff to get to work on this project.   

The KEDS team will be releasing some updates beginning Nov. 24. First, we have been working on revisions of the rules in the KEDS system. Through collaboration with initial adopters, we have been able to update a substantial number of rules in the Data Validation Portal (DVP). These updates to the KEDS portal and the corresponding documentation, which is posted on the KEDS website, will be updated during the week of Thanksgiving.   

Along with the rules updates, the KEDS team will be releasing the December training sessions on the Training & Support Scheduling page. Our team has made some adjustments to the training after receiving feedback from early attendees. Future sessions will start five minutes prior to the presentation to test the audio and slide sharing.  Information about January trainings will be released prior to Christmas.  

For the remainder of the calendar year, the KEDS team will focus on getting schools and districts connected. Our goal is that all public schools get connected as close to Jan. 1 as possible. We can then move our focus to helping districts with the process of uploading data and resolving errors in the data validation portal. We are evaluating the data coming in and reviewing errors being submitted. 

All the links and resources discussed in this article can be found on our Getting Started webpage. We suggest staff who are learning about KEDS start there. Updates to the KEDS project are announced through KSDEweekly, the KIDS listserv and our website at https://kedx.ksde.gov.   

Contact Christopher Fletcher, KEDS@ksde.gov, with questions.