By Christopher Fletcher, KSDE IT team 

The Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) continues to move forward with the modernization of their statewide 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, 183 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 attended the four unique presentations offered by the KEDS team. There were close to 650 registrations for the November 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 released updates to the Data Validation Portal (DVP) during the week of Nov. 24. First, we have been working on revisions of the jobs and rules in the  system. Through collaboration with initial adopters, we have updated around 65 rules in the DVP. These updates to the KEDS portal and the corresponding documentation, which is posted on the KEDS website, were updated on Nov. 25.   

Along with the rules update, the KEDS team released the first two weeks of 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 training 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.