North Dakota SLDS Modernization Project

The North Dakota SLDS Modernization Project will help ND improve its Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) infrastructure and address current limitations to providing increased services to meet growing demands. North Dakota recognizes the importance of growing and modernizing the SLDS in order to provide greater value to current partners as well as future partners, including human services, health services, corrections and juvenile justice, and additional workforce development programs. This project will help the state transition its existing SLDS to an architecture that more readily provisions hardware, databases, services, software, and analytics to respond to increasing demands for information and data. This project aligns with initiatives in ND to reinvent government and embrace technology to lower costs and produce better outcomes.

The SLDS Modernization Project has three primary outcomes:

1. Implement standardized data models in the ND SLDS;
2. Modernize ND SLDS infrastructure and adopt cloud-based infrastructure and services; and
3. Expand the SLDS to include juvenile justice.

The project will help North Dakota integrate standards-based education data models, including Ed-Fi and Common Education Data Standards (CEDS). Ed-Fi will help the state to be able to accept data from more vendor communities and contribute back to communities that also adopt these data standards. Use of the CEDS services available through the community will promote automation of repetitive reporting. This automation of repetitive reporting is a priority for the state and will contribute to better use of IT staff.

Cloud-based infrastructure and services are a critical component to the SLDS goal of a comprehensive P-20W (early learning through workforce) system. The need to govern and make data available to differing communities of interest requires an architecture that is built for providing these features, not building them from scratch. The North Dakota SLDS Data Modernization project will help ND utilize cloud platforms and services to reduce current operational limitations and increase its ability to respond to increasing demands for information and data. North Dakota SLDS Modernization will allow ND to redirect technical human resources to providing service and value to partners and citizens, rather than managing more hardware and software systems.

The SLDS Modernization project expands the SLDS to include juvenile justice data. The project will link SLDS education and workforce systems to perform education studies of outcomes for students that have been detained in the juvenile system, especially for youth who come into contact with more than one state agency or program. The data will help the state better understand factors that contribute to success for these youth.

Finally, ND would like to participate in testing a new school level poverty measure.