ARRA Grant FY 09 (Round 4)

In 2009, Florida submitted an application for the Fiscal Year 2009 (FY09) grant in the series of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's (ARRA) SLDS grants from the Institute of Education Sciences. This grant is often referred to as "Round 4" internally.

“The long-term goal [of the SLDS Grant Program] is to enable the creation of comprehensive systems that permit the generation and use of accurate and timely data; support informed decision-making at all levels of the education system; increase efficiency with which data may be analyzed to support the continuous improvements of education services and outcomes; facilitate research to improve student achievement and close achievement gaps; support education accountability systems; and simplify the processes used by State education agencies to make educational data transparent through public and Federal reporting.” – U.S. Department of Education, 2010

Florida’s Grant Award from the ARRA:
$10 million

Project Timeframe:
3 years – July 2010 – June 2013

Florida’s Proposed Objectives

1. Upgrade PK12, community colleges, workforce education and SUS data systems Goal: Utilize more current processing methodologies and technical approaches for the source data systems so they remain compatible with the Education Data Warehouse (EDW)

   • Technology and methodologies for PK12, community colleges, and workforce education outdated
   • SUS data system requires enhancements
   • Security for data and ability to link data into EDW are key

2. Create System to Assign a Unique Identifier
   Goal: Track students using unique identifier instead of Social Security Numbers to ensure student confidentiality

   • Assign unique identifiers to be used from elementary through postsecondary
   • Unique identifier different than those assigned by EDW in order to maintain confidentiality when providing deidentified unit record data to educational researchers

3. Report Building Tool
   Goal: Provide data to stakeholders in a user friendly format available via the Web

   • Conduct focus groups and surveys to determine what tables and data are useful to teachers, principals, districts, and legislators
   • Provide a report building tool to allow user to build tables
   • Create predefined tables available to the general public for easy access
   • Establish a Search function for the FLDOE and FLBOG Web sites dedicated to searching for statistics and reports

4. Data Mining Tool
   Goal: FLDOE identify best practices and problem areas quicker

   • The data mining tool is software that combs through vast amounts of data looking for patterns and anomalies.
   • FLDOE program/policy staff will be trained in how to use the results of the data mining tool to highlight district best practices and to identify program/policy areas in need of review

For more information, please visit http://nces.ed.gov/programs/SLDS/ .