This year's eventful first legislative session resulted in a minimum of 20 bills that will affect TSDS. (Another seven bills will bring changes to other major TEA programs, like the Foundation School Program (FSP) and the Educator Certification Online System (ECOS).)
Some of the especially significant legislation that will affect TSDS include:
- HB 22 - overhauling the LEA accountability rating
- HB 2442 - changing the way we count school days from units of days to minutes
- HB 674 - preventing out-of-school suspension from students in Grade 3 and below
In addition, TEA released an excerpted TEDS Addendum in July, as recent legislation has made the planned suite of TEDS changes obsolete. We released sections 9, 10, and updates to the code tables so that LEAs and vendors can prepare for changes to Unique ID (UID) and the Operational Data Store (ODS).
More recently, TEA released the TEDS 2017-2018 Addendum on August 28.
The 2016-2017 Early Childhood Data Collection closed in
August with 990 (90%) districts and charters submitting kindergarten data and 972
(92%) districts and charters submitting prekindergarten data, including new early learning and High Quality Prekindergarten data.
Also in 2016-2017, we launched new LEA-facing prekindergarten and kindergarten reports, including kindergarten readiness reports at the state, district, and campus level. With the additional data
collected in 2016-2017, we will be able to greatly enhance our public reports, which will clarify strengths and opportunities for resource prioritization, targeted classroom instruction, and development of action plans for families, educators, administrators, community stakeholders, and policy makers.
The new ECDS release reduced redundant data collection and provides a model for combining data across different collections to streamline reporting.
TEA rolled out a small update to Unique ID this August with version 10.1.1. In this release, the components of the Individual Person Information screen were broken out into tabs for easier navigation.
We'll implement a bigger change in March 2018, when we release version 10.3.0, which will include a new enrollment tracking functionality (comparable to the legacy Person Enrollment Tracker in EDIT+). In addition, 10.3.0 will include a new batch file format, changes to the Web Service Description Language, and new email and reports features.
These releases move us closer to our goal of consolidating the TSDS data collection platform and making it more convenient and intuitive for the user.
 Click to download a full-size quickstart guide to bundling
Long-time PEIMS users have been clamoring for a bundling feature that would allow them to download multiple reports at one time as a zipped folder. We're pleased to announce that we have released the first installment of a new bundling feature in August. This initial release provides a TEA-defined Summary Bundle for each collection that is available to authorized LEA users with the PEIMS Generate Reports privilege.
In TSDS, bundles are customized for each user--in any given bundle, users can only see and download the reports for which they have permissions. This means that one bundle can serve a broad range of users, while still ensuring privacy and data security.
In addition, while reports are now run by individual, bundles are run at the organization level, meaning that a PEIMS coordinator can generate a bundle, and it will be available for download by all of his or her TEAL-authorized staff.
TEA plans to release further bundling features in the future, including bundles for campuses and ESCs, and the ability for LEAs and ESCs to define their own bundles.
Download our quickstart guide to bundling, below, to learn more about this new feature.
TEA has created a Hurricane Harvey Resources page to serve as a central resource for questions and issues arising from the hurricane.
If you have questions related to education and the storm or its aftermath, please visit this page.
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