Calista, of the Utah State Board of Education data team, and Riley, a USBE data staffer, told LEAs that the December finalizer is activated on Dec. 1 and that LEAs must finalize their December submission by 5 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 8 (the 7th falls on a weekend). Calista urged districts not to wait until the deadline because submission processing is slow and queued jobs can fail: "I would definitely try to finalize before the eighth," she said.

Riley explained that level-2 address and district-of-residence warnings can become fatal errors that will block students from processing. He walked through troubleshooting steps: verify address spelling and completeness with families, validate the address using the UGRC (atlas.utah.gov) checking both city and ZIP separately, and if UGRC does not recognize the address, add a GPS coordinate or geocode. "If you have currently an invalid address or invalid district of residence warning, then you need to actually treat it as a fatal," Riley said.

Cliff, a technical lead, reported developer fixes to processing snapshot code that should resolve many recent mismatches and speed the next collections. He also said the system cannot safely remove a single submission once it reaches certain processing stages: "The developers have told me, no, that they don't have a safe way to be able to exclude 1 out." USBE said it will monitor the address/district validations and may convert them to warnings rather than errors before Dec. 1 if problems persist.

Practical guidance USBE gave LEAs:
- Validate addresses through UGRC and use the UGRC district-boundary map to assign district of residence.
- If UGRC misassigns a city or boundary, use geocodes and coordinate with UGRC and the lieutenant governor’s office for boundary updates.
- Start submissions early (Dec. 1–8 window) and avoid starting a new submission while a prior nightly submission is still queued.

USBE also flagged that, where appropriate, it will communicate whether validations will be relaxed before the finalizer turns on, and encouraged LEAs to contact the data team if validations do not clear after the developers’ fix.