Digital Equity Gap Data Can Be Used to:
- Ensure districts are able to track and support the individual needs of every student
- Identify possible Internet providers that can serve a location
- Provide local community partners with critical data needed when submitting broadband grant applications
- Advocate and plan for broadband investments in your community
- Fulfill any state or federal reporting requirements which may arise with CARES, E-rate, or other funding
The digital equity questions are the result of a coordinated effort with the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Education SuperHighway, and the Ed-Fi Alliance (affiliated with the Dell Foundation). In May 2021, the US Department of Education added these questions as data elements to the Common Educational Data Standard (CEDS). CEDS is the federal government’s framework for all education data, adding significant validation to the questions and items.
Student Information System Data Submission
The Department of Public Instruction wants to ensure that schools are able to continue collecting high quality digital equity data to best serve students and families. The 2022-23 school year is the third year of the digital equity data collection and the questions and responses have remained the same during that time.
New for the 2023-24 school year, several of the previously asked questions and responses will need to be updated to reflect the latest Ed-Fi standard for data quality and assurance. Refer to the September 28, 2022 knowledge base article for the exact wording that should be incorporated into registration/enrollment forms for the 2023-24 school year and beyond.
Translations Available: Albanian, Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Hmong, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, Ukrainian
Just like any data rolled over from year to year, there should be a mechanism to re-confirm/update the data if it is rolled over.
State SIS vendors understand the importance of collecting this data. Contact your student information system vendor to receive an update on adding these fields and reporting this information through your SIS via the WISEData Ed-Fi API.