NY districts get help certifying data

Certica Solutions today announced the launch of CertifySIRS™ as a hosted data certification service designed to assist New York State school districts with their state data reporting.

CertifySIRS helps districts certify the data that is reported to NYSED through Level 0, which is the first level of the NYSED’s data collection system known as the Student Information Repository System (SIRS). Increasingly, districts are challenged by the task of validating and correcting the data reported to NYSED, which takes time and resources away from important educational and administrative tasks. Certica Solutions has designed CertifySIRS to help district and school staff validate and monitor data directly from their student information and special education systems with a highly automated, continuous approach.

CertifySIRS runs a nightly battery of hundreds of data certification rules against a district’s administrative systems to check for data that is incomplete, inaccurate or otherwise expected to compromise a Level 0 data submission. The data certification rules used in CertifySIRS have been authored and tested jointly by Certica Solutions and four Regional Information Centers in New York and are based entirely on the NYSED Level 0 data validations. On a daily basis, district and school personnel can review online Data Certification Scorecards™, which provide details on data issues requiring attention, and prescriptions to assist users in resolving those issues. CertifySIRS eliminates the need for manual application-specific error reports, giving school and district personnel an easy way of reviewing problems with their data.

Said Mark Rankovic, Certica Solutions’ president and chief executive officer, “Certica has been fortunate to work with four New York State Regional Information Centers over the last three years, helping nearly 75 school districts improve their data quality and state reporting processes. We are excited to now be offering CertifySIRS on a hosted basis directly to individual districts in other regions of the state, and believe that CertifySIRS will similarly enable these districts to save time and assure funding and accountability.”