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Agency describes Ed‑Fi adoption to normalize student information while statewide SIS was rejected
Summary
Agency of Education officials told the House committee that Vermont adopted the Ed‑Fi data standard and now ingests student data from multiple student information systems (SIS) to normalize records; a single statewide SIS was rejected because districts cited cost and staff time burdens.
Agency of Education staff told the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee that Vermont has adopted the Ed‑Fi data standard to collect and normalize student information from multiple local student information systems and that a single statewide SIS was not adopted.
Jen Hicks, division director of the AOE’s Data Management and Analysis Division, told the committee that four different SIS products remain in use across Vermont districts and that Ed‑Fi serves as an intermediary. “What Ed‑Fi does is it hooks up to any district system and pulls the data down and then normalizes it,” Hicks said. She explained that Ed‑Fi maps divergent local encodings (for example, “m” vs. “male”) into a common format for state reporting.
Why it matters: Standardized student data enables more timely data validation, quality feedback to districts and consolidation of collections such as beginning‑ and end‑of‑year enrollment, staff rosters, and demographic data. AOE said Ed‑Fi has enabled a pilot year and a concurrent transition year and that the agency has moved to full Ed‑Fi for routine data collection.
What the agency told the committee: Hicks said the state piloted Ed‑Fi, ran a concurrent reporting year, and then adopted it for ongoing collections. The agency plans to expand the Ed‑Fi feed to include special education data and to migrate other separate data collections into Ed‑Fi to reduce manual merging and lower opportunities for error. Hicks also said Ed‑Fi allowed AOE to deliver near‑real‑time dashboards that show districts data‑quality issues.
Reasons districts opposed a single statewide SIS: AOE staff told the committee that local education agencies raised two primary objections to adopting a single statewide SIS—cost of licensing and maintenance, and the staff time and effort required to switch local practice and train personnel. Those implementation burdens, staff said, were a decisive factor in choosing an Ed‑Fi approach that permits districts to keep their local SIS while the state normalizes the reported data.
Technical notes: Hicks identified Ed‑Analytics (Ed Analytics) as the vendor/consortium that provides the Ed‑Fi tooling and described Ed‑Fi as an API that connects to district systems and normalizes data for state use. AOE staff said the agency has completed mapping work and is expanding data collections into Ed‑Fi over coming years.
Ending: Committee members requested follow‑up materials and AOE said it would provide additional documentation on rollout, the Ed‑Fi project timeline and any outstanding technical or project items.
