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State data team urges LEAs to finalize year‑end UTREx submissions by July 7, flags address and district‑of‑residence errors
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Summary
Utah education data staff told local education agencies to finalize year‑end UTREx submissions by 5 p.m. on Monday, July 7, and outlined common fatal errors—especially address and district‑of‑residence validations tied to the Utah Geospatial Resource Center (UGRC)—that will block student records from funding and reporting.
The Utah State Board of Education’s data and statistics team told local education agencies during a June data meeting that the year‑end UTREx finalization window is open and the hard deadline for finalization is Monday, July 7 at 5 p.m.
The team urged LEAs to finalize early — ideally by July 3 — to avoid weekend staffing gaps and to allow time to resolve technical issues. Aaron Brough, director of data and statistics, said as of the morning of the meeting 52 LEAs had finalized at least once and many others remained in progress.
The teams emphasized that fatal validation errors will block student records from the finalized submission and therefore from membership and funding calculations. Two categories of validations were singled out: address validation (S1Dot310/S1Dot398 and related checks) and district‑of‑residence (DOR) level‑2 validations. Riley, who led the address/DOR training, explained that UTREx makes API calls to the Utah Geospatial Resource Center (UGRC) and uses UGRC’s address points and UGRC school district boundaries as the authoritative source for both address validation and district‑of‑residence checks. She warned that an address that appears in Google Maps, USPS, or a county file is not sufficient for UTREx unless it exists in the UGRC data.
The data team provided practical steps for clearing address and DOR fatal errors: verify the address text for typos or missing directionals, check the UGRC lookup (atlas.utah.gov) or the UGRC API, and, if necessary, supply valid GPS decimal coordinates or full Google plus codes in the geocode field. Riley noted that UTREx uses a priority order (GPS/geocode vs. physical address) so districts can preserve nonstandard entries in the physical address field while providing a validated geocode in a separate field.
For DOR issues specifically, Riley said LEAs must confirm that (1) the UGRC‑validated address is actually the location the family reported, (2) the UGRC school district boundary for that location matches the LEA’s claimed DOR, and (3) if a district boundary recently changed but is not yet in UGRC the county legislative body must file certification with the lieutenant governor so UGRC can update its boundaries. Riley referenced state filing requirements and noted UGRC updates are generally fast once correct documentation is received.
The team cautioned that level‑2 fatal errors are applied after an LEA finalizes; an affected student may appear in pre‑finalization counts but drop out of the finalized dataset if errors are not cleared. The result can affect cohort membership and funding—for example, students with 180 days membership are considered full time for funding purposes.
The UTREx team also addressed several common data issues that have produced false positives in validations and reported fixes: errors that incorrectly applied to out‑of‑state or foreign exchange students, caching problems that have since been resolved, and specific validation logic around exit codes (for example, constraints involving exit code 11 and related completion codes). The team instructed LEAs to notify data and statistics immediately if a finalization attempt returns an error.
Other year‑end details included: the school summary cumulative report shows demographics “as of Oct. 1” (which may differ from SIS snapshots and explains many count mismatches); kindergarten reading and early numeracy fields must be reported (four fields per measure, eight fields total) and currently appear in the examine file though not yet in the school summary PDF; and the S5 child nutrition record must be submitted both to UTREx and via a separate Qualtrics round‑2 form this year, per child nutrition guidance.
Staff reiterated operational reminders: do not pause scheduled daily collections without deleting them after finalization; download and archive the year‑end reports immediately after finalization because those files update as later submissions arrive; historical updates and SSID merge requests submitted by the stated internal deadlines were prioritized, but late requests can still be made without a completion guarantee; and the data gateway finalize button can be clicked multiple times during the window but should only be used once the latest collection timestamp shows processing completed.
The team warned that several validation changes are now fatal for year‑end (district‑of‑residence and address validations among them) and asked LEAs to respond to the “courtesy review” letters sent in June — the top section of those letters lists items the state requires a reply to because they affect funding and reporting.
The state’s guidance package included contact points for help: UTREx support for technical issues, the data and statistics team for data questions, and SIS vendor help desks for vendor‑specific troubleshooting. The team repeatedly urged LEAs to finalize early to avoid last‑minute technical bottlenecks and to ensure students are included in final membership and cohort counts.
