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Date Message Sent |
Subject |
Sent By |
| 12/3/2004 |
Student demographic update |
Scott Gausland - State |
| This email is to inform you all of the update currently taking place to the student master table. The following fields are being updated using the October enrollment data: Lasid, District Code, School Code, Grade and Race. If you have transferred students after the October enrollment report, the information will revert back to the snapshot as of October 1st.
There were far too many inconsistencies to warrant an update of the name, gender and birthday columns. I have identified hundreds of records in which the wrong SASID was listed for the student in the October enrollment file. Please pay extra attention to the December roster to make sure the proper SASID is used for each student.
After all districts have reported their December roster, I will send out a list of students to each district to verify. This list will contain students from your December report that have a firstname, lastname, birthday or gender significantly different than the student master table. I will ask each of you to verify that the information is correct for each student and respond back to me.
In the next few months I intend on expanding the number of fields we all use in the student master table to help the matching process. A suffix field will be added to store Jr, III, etc. I will create a process that parses out this information from the lastname (or firstname) columns using the data currently in the student master table. Also a full middle name column will be added. Both of these additional columns should help all of us make better decisions with partial matches. I hope to expand the March roster to include these new columns.
I also want to create a formal name change process, so we can record when a student’s name changes. Perhaps displaying the old name will help with the matching process also. This process could also be used when an error is discovered in a student’s birthday too. Another enhancement may be to create a few new columns to store nicknames. For example, students that migrated from foreign countries may use an American name and their original name. Some districts use the student’s formal name, some use the student’s American name.
I invite all of you to respond back with any feedback regarding the ideas listed above. Also I would like to know whether your student information system currently stores a full middle name, and if not does it have the capacity to do so in the future.
Thank you.
Scott Gausland
222-2240 x2240
Please respond to my email address: scott.gausland@ride.ri.gov
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