Direct link to this page: https://schoolinkshome.notion.site/Washington-SchooLinks-Data-Integration-Guide-1215d9aa435f8087b119cbc7ec940be2

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Executive Summary

Your district will be using SchooLinks as the tool to complete High School and Beyond Plan (HSBP). This document is aimed at giving school district staff that are supporting the data integration process from the technical perspective the knowledge and context to get the SchooLinks platform up and running at their districts. In this document, we do not focus extensively on the use of the platform by school counselors, CTE, or academic stakeholders, but instead aim to provide minimal context to guide district technology and data staff through the process of supporting the integration from a tactical perspective.

We explain the process by which Washington districts will implement the platform and references a set of more general documentation found in our general Technical and Data Integration Guide. We have linked specific pages to provide additional guidance in the general document above that cover how to share this data and the structure of file schemas that SchooLinks Accepts.

At minimum, districts will need to provide the below sets of data to SchooLinks:

1. Rostering: ClassLink, Clever, OR school, student, staff, and guardian CSV files generated from your Student Information System (SIS)
2. PDF exports of your special education students’ IEP Transition Plans
3. **Course Master** to turn on and off specific courses from the state course catalog in your district (and in specific schools) and to ensure that local courses are set up for your students to plan.
4. Student historical and current coursework: SchooLinks can accept this current year and historical data in the same file or two different files of past and current courses

At this point it is likely that we will be able to populate much of required data for districts whose SISs support programmatic pulling of this data though an API or direct database connection and we have documentation for other SISs in Washington that covers setting up reports and queries to provide this data to SchooLinks. We will be expanding this documentation prior to the HSBP platform launch to cover additional specifics

Based on your district's structure and intended usage, SchooLinks has the ability the ability to integrate a variety of other datasets that enhance student access to relevant information and support while developing their HSBP, all covered in our general Technical and Data Integration Guide.

The most common files we expect Washington districts to plan to send are:

1. Historical HSBP data (PDFs of plans)
2. **GPA** and Class rank to support college application acceptance planning and prediction in our college search and college application modules.
3. **Historical application data** from previous CCR platforms to power scattergrams in SchooLinks
4. Counselor caseloads, which may be represented in sections from your roster server, added via CSV file or created in our UI
5. An indication of schools your students will attend next year from a) a feeder pattern or b) a plan school file. This will be necessary for all districts with more than one high school both for 8th graders transitioning to high school and high school students approved for transfer to another high school. </aside>

Introduction and Background

What is SchooLinks?

As the provider of Washington’s new universal HSBP platform, SchooLinks is a comprehensive solution to support students’ career and college exploration and preparation and academic planning throughout middle and high school. We are partnering with OSPI to simplify the implementation process as much as possible. This means we will be configuring the HSBP requirements, academic planning structure, and adding assessment data on behalf of the districts. Some of this data we can load ahead of time, and other datasets will be populated into your accounts after initial rostering.

Who is this document for?

This is for the team members at school districts who are supporting the technical setup of SchooLinks accounts.

You don’t have to have a specific title. We’ve seen anyone from Chief Technology Officers, to tech directors to CEDARS/reporting directors, to administrative assistants, counselors, teachers, and principals take on this role.

Ideally, the staff in this role should be interested in implementing new technology, have data-base and Excel skills, and an ability to think logically. Especially important is the ability to follow instructions about how to use your Student Information System (SIS) and its administrative functions.

What am I going to learn from this document?

Our goal with this document is to give you:

1. The right amount of background information about SchooLinks and the domain of work that we’re supporting. We need you to be able to understand and support the “business stakeholders” in the implementation. These are most immediately counseling and academic staff and school/district leadership and more broadly the students and their parents.
2. The ability to access and navigate to the parts of the SchooLinks platform for you to be able to access data integration settings and audit logs and have a basic idea of where the data flowing into the platform shows.
3. A familiarity with the data asks, schemas, and expected update lifecycle of this data.
4. Links to resources and ways/methods to get support with your rostering and sources systems.

In this document, we do not focus extensively on the use of the platform by school counselors, CTE, or academic stakeholders, but instead aim to provide minimal context to guide district technology and data staff through the process of supporting the integration from a tactical perspective.