CALPADS Update FLASH #165

To:           Local Educational Agency (LEA) Representatives

From:      California Department of Education (CDE) –
                California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS) Team

Date:       November 22, 2019

Subject:  CALPADS Update FLASH #165

2019–20 Fall 1 Submission Requirements Modification

The CDE recognizes the hard work of LEA staff to incorporate additional data into the Fall 1 submission, and that doing so requires more collaboration both within and external to the LEA. To enable LEAs to focus on certifying the most critical Fall 1 data, the CDE is making the following adjustments to the 2019–20 Fall 1 submission:

• Report 16.5 – Students with Disabilities – Student Services by Primary Disability will be excluded from the set of certification reports that LEAs must approve as part of Fall 1. LEAs, however, are strongly encouraged to continue submitting special education services data on an ongoing basis because this data is required for monitoring and Certification Report 16.5 will be part of the 2019–20 End-of-Year (EOY) 4 submission. For Fall 1, Report 16.5 will be removed from the Certification Details – LEA user interface and will be moved under Additional Supporting Reports.
• The certification validations related to the Student Services (SSRV) file, CERT140 (Missing Special Education [SPED] record for a student with a SSRV record) and CERT142 (Missing Special Education Service for Education Plan Type Code 100, 150, or 200), will be relaxed from a Fatal to a Warning.
• The CDE continues to encourage LEAs and Special Education Local Plan Areas (SELPAs) to complete their individual approvals by December 20, 2019, with the understanding they can utilize the Amendment Window through January 24, 2020 to further update data to ensure the accuracy of the Fall 1 data. The CDE, however, will use Fall 1 data that LEAs have approved by the December 20, 2019 certification deadline for the First Principal Apportionment (P1). For LEAs that fail to approve their Fall 1 data by the certification deadline, the CDE will use data from 2018–19 to issue P1. The CDE will continue to use data certified by January 24, 2020, the close of the Amendment Window, for P2 calculations.

With the rollout of this new functionality, the CDE understands the need to address the issues that arise as soon as possible, and to provide relief by loosening validations balanced with the need for quality data.

Viewing Fall 1 SPED Certification Errors

LEAs have been working diligently to resolve all Fall 1 errors related to input validation rules (IVRs) and certification validation rules (CVRs) in order to meet the approval and certification deadlines. Currently, only IVRs related to the SPED or SSRV files are sent back through the application programming interface (API) to the special education data system (SEDS) where they are easily visible to special education data coordinators. The special education related CVR errors, however, are not being returned through the API to the SEDS and so the special education data coordinators are often not aware that these errors exist.

In order to see these errors, special education data coordinators must log on to CALPADS, go to the Certification Status LEA Approval page, and click on the Total Error/Warnings link.  A Certification Error Report can also be obtained through the Reports menu and selecting Snapshots. Keep in mind that the Fall 1 Reports role is required to see the Certification Error Report.

CALPADS data coordinators are encouraged to be patient about having special education data coordinators resolve these CVR errors because many of them are still attempting to submit the SPED and SSRV records and resolve the associated IVR errors. Additionally, many of these CVR errors will resolve on their own once all of the SPED and SSRV records are submitted and posted to CALPADS.

We continue to encourage special education data coordinators to focus on the IVRs, and, only when those are resolved, to focus on the remaining fatal CVRs.