New items in the Content Library
The SD-STARS team updated the Content Library with the following articles, documents, and guides to help educators. Users may find these articles by using the search box at the top of each page in SD-STARS or by selecting the Content Library menu.
Continuous Improvement in Education: A Toolkit
The Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) released a toolkit for schools and districts. This practitioner-friendly toolkit is designed to provide an overview of continuous improvement processes in education, with a focus on the use of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles. It also offers related tools and resources that educational practitioners can use to implement continuous improvement processes in their own schools, districts, or agencies.
The toolkit includes a customizable workbook, reproducible templates, and short informational videos. The toolkit begins with an introduction to continuous improvement, followed by customizable content for a series of meetings that guide a team of educators through the process of identifying a common problem, generating a series of evidence-based change practices to test and study, testing those change practices, collecting and analyzing data, and reflecting on and using evidence to identify next steps.
The toolkit leads educational practitioners through a series of PDSA cycles designed explicitly for an educational setting. Real-world case examples illustrate the process in an educational context.
Parent and Family Digital Learning Guide
The U.S. Department of Education released a new Parent and Family Digital Learning Guide, a resource to help parents and guardians understand how digital tools can provide tailored learning opportunities, engage students with course materials, encourage creative expression, and enrich the educational experience.
This guide aims to help all parents and caregivers, including those who have limited experience with digital tools, those who are experts with these tools, and anywhere in between. Each section starts with foundational pieces and builds from there.
Accountability: 2020 Equity Report Calculation Guide
The Accountability team at the department released the 2020 Equity Report Calculation Guide. This resource answers frequently asked questions regarding the department’s State Plan details for reporting disproportional rates of access to qualified teachers in Title I schools serving low-income and minority students.
The School and Educator Equity Report is a new addition to the Accountability Report Card in response to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and State Plan under ESEA section 1111(g)(1)(B), which requires states to report disproportional rates of access to qualified teachers for low-income and minority students served by Title I schools as compared to all schools.
FERPA and COVID-19
The U.S. Department of Education released FERPA & Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Frequently Asked Questions. The purpose of this guidance is to answer questions that school officials have concerning the disclosure of personally identifiable information from students’ education records to outside entities when addressing COVID-19.
Questions posed in this document include:
- Do parents and eligible students have to provide consent before an educational agency or institution discloses PII from education records?
- How does the health or safety emergency exception to FERPA’s consent requirement permit an educational agency or institution to disclose PII from the education records of affected students?
- If an educational agency or institution learns that student(s) in attendance at the school are out sick due to COVID-19, may it disclose information about the student’s illness under FERPA to other students and their parents in the school community without prior written parental or eligible student consent?
- More questions about the impact of COVID-19 on FERPA-related practices
FERPA and Virtual Learning Related Resources
As educators and students move to virtual learning during times of social distancing due to COVID-19, the U.S. Department of Education Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) has received questions about available resources on virtual learning and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). They responded to these questions in a document called FERPA and Virtual Learning Resources.
FERPA is the federal law that protects the privacy of personally identifiable information (PII) in students’ education records. “Education records” are those records that are: (1) directly related to a student; and (2) maintained by an educational agency or institution or by a party acting for the agency or institution. FERPA provides parents and eligible students the right to access a student’s education records, the right to seek to have the records amended, and the right to protect the PII in students’ education records. (An “eligible student” is a student who has turned 18 or is attending college at any age.) Under FERPA, an educational agency or institution may not disclose PII from students’ education records, without consent, unless the disclosure meets an exception under FERPA. 20 U.S.C. 1232g; 34 C.F.R. Part 99.