Information - National Origin questions in Aeries Online Enrollment and CALPADS process changes
Kevin Praeger
The 3/25/2019 version of Aeries Online Enrollment has just been released which will remove the Country field from the Other District Enrollments page. The State field is now a free-text 2-character field.
Kevin Praeger
@Natalie CALPADS has released some guidance in relation to this. There is a link in the original post above.
I see the note regarding turning off the Birth Country field to make it "not required"; this information is required in CALPADS however. How are we advised to comply with CALPADS if a student can be enrolled without the Birth Country.
Also, are schools also making the date fields in LAC table "not required" as well? Thanks.
I agree with Terri. It would be nice to remove the requirement for a lot of those fields such as state and zip.
Thanks for the update Kevin. I agree with Jan on turning off the 'requirement' for the State and Zip fields.
Thanks Kevin, great to hear. Do you know if they are going to also make the State and ZIP fields NOT required?
Kevin Praeger
We have discussed this further, and we will be making an additional adjustment to Aeries Online Enrollment. We will be removing the Country field from the previous school information collected on the Other District Enrollments page. We are also adjusting the State field to be a drop-down of only US States. We plan to release this update right away, by the end of March 2019.
Kevin Praeger
@Jan - As mentioned before, we'll update this forum thread with any relevant information. We are discussing this issue again next week.
Kevin, any idea when Online Enrollment can either delete the required Country field be deleted/hidden or the Address fields changed to just one long free-text field?
Kevin Praeger
Update: CALPADS today has released CALPADS Update FLASH #151 on this issue: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sp/cl/calpadsupdflash151.asp
Kevin Praeger
@Terri - We received your ticket on the same matter. We'll update your ticket, as well as this forum thread with any relevant information.
We too have been contacted by the AG office to have Aeries remove the
'Country' field removed from the previous school screen. Here's their comment:
In our review of the registration package, we noticed that, under the “Other District Enrollments” section, the District asks for the country where a child previously attended school. Would the District also be able to contact Aeries to remove this data field from the online enrollment form?
Will there be another update to address this?
One more thing; if they start to enter previous school info, the Country field comes back as a Required field to continue.
I agree with Jan. There are many times where AIR is requiring more information than the parent knows at the time of enrollment (they may be enrolling at school on their phone and looking up the contact name at the old school is a little tedious) and they end up making up information so they can get to the next step.
I wonder if it can be fixed by just having a free-form Address field? Many don't know the official address anyway, so guess at much of the items.
Kevin Praeger
It has come to our attention that several school districts in California have recently received letters from the California Department of Justice, office of the Attorney General, regarding Compliance with California Law and the Attorney General Model Policies for K-12 Schools. A press release on this topic was also released by the Attorney General.
These policies prohibit school districts from collecting information related to national origin at the time of enrollment. However, since many data elements in this category are required for various state and federal reporting purposes, schools may solicit this information separately from the school enrollment process.
Several customers have contacted us requesting that we make modifications to Aeries Online Enrollment to not ask any questions related to national origin to become compliant.
We are committed to assisting districts in being compliant with these laws and policies. As a result, we will be making an immediate change to Aeries Online Enrollment to, by default, not ask any questions related to national origin such as Place of Birth and US School Entry Date. We are also considering adding the ability to collect this information as part of the Data Confirmation process.
A secondary issue related to CALPADS has also come up: Birth Country (SENR 1.21/SINF 2.22) is a required data element to enroll a student and obtain an SSID. We have been in communication with CALPADS, and they will soon be releasing guidance and possibly make some adjustments to their system regarding the birth country field. Since birth country is still required for CALPADS at this time, our recommendation is to adjust the code translations for the STU.BCU field to map Aeries code Blank to CALPADS code UU-Unknown. After obtaining the correct birth country for the student, Aeries and CALPADS would need to be updated.
We appreciate the information that we have been provided regarding this issue. Should you need any assistance with adjusting your codes or anything else, please contact Aeries Support.
Update 3/6/2019: CALPADS has released Update Flash #151 on this issue, confirming the above information: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sp/cl/calpadsupdflash151.asp
Update 3/12/2019: We will be making an additional adjustment to Aeries Online Enrollment to remove the Country field from the previous school information collected on the Other District Enrollments page. We are also adjusting the State field to be a drop-down of only US States. We plan to release this update by the end of March 2019.
Update 3/25/2019: A version of Aeries Online Enrollment has just been released which will remove the Country field from the Other District Enrollments page. The State field is now a free-text 2-character field.
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