This memo is to inform schools, districts, Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), and charter schools of the 2019-20 certification of data for the reported 2019- 20 school year (SY) to the New York State Education Department (NYSED) via the Student Information Repository System (SIRS).

Please be advised and share this information with district, BOCES, and school personnel who are responsible for data reporting and verification processes of your data as reported to the NYSED Data Warehouse (L2DW). The Office of Information and Reporting Services (IRS) has updated the SIRS Level 2 Reporting Environment (L2RPT) to reflect data reporting due to the impact of COVID-19, the U.S. Department of Education (USED) waiver impacting accountability, the NYSED exemptions to graduation, and the cancellation of the 2019-20 State assessments, including June and August 2020 Regents examinations.

As a reminder, the End of Year 2019-20 SY deadline to report data to the L2DW is Friday, August 21, 2020. Your District Data Coordinator or Regional Information Center (RIC) Data Warehouse (DW) Service personnel will have earlier reporting deadlines as they must ensure all data as reported by districts is pushed to the L2DW no later than Friday, August 21, 2020. We encourage you to work closely with your RIC to meet these reporting deadlines.

Due to the cancellation of June and August 2020 Regents examinations and the USED reporting waiver for 2019-20 SY, we have extended the assessment fact collection through October 9, 2020 to provide districts and schools more time to report the assessment data. Please see the Reporting of Student Exemptions for the June and August 2020 Regents and Approved Alternative Examinations in SIRS in Response to COVID-19 Related School and District Closures memo released June 4, 2020.

The 2019-20 SIRS End of Year (EOY) Data Statement of Certification form will be available in the Information Data Exchange (IDEx) application on the NYSED Business Application Portal (IRSP) in August and is due to the Department on or before Friday, September 4, 2020. Since the assessment fact collection has been extended through October 9, 2020, this year, the 2019-20 SIRS EOY Data Statement of Certification form will not include the verification of SIRS 202 or SIRS 309.

Data Verification

NYSED makes available to school districts, BOCES, charter schools, and other reporting entities tools for reviewing, verifying, and certifying their data throughout the school year. Information officers and data coordinators must be familiar with the various systems and applications associated with data verification. All SIRS data verification tools are available in the form of verification reports within the Level 2 Reporting Environment (L2RPT). These reports are available and should be used throughout the school year to ensure all data are reported accurately in SIRS.

Reporting errors discovered from a review of these reports must be updated. Updates must be made in the local data source system. If data is not changed in the source system, what exists in the source system will overwrite any data submitted elsewhere and the data quality errors will persist.

Data in the L2RPT reports are refreshed on a daily, weekly, or annual basis (depending on the particular domain in SIRS) until the closing of the Level 2 Data Warehouse. Your Data Coordinator or your Level 1 Data Coordinator can assist you with the data refresh schedules if needed. Please pay close attention to the counts within the various subgroup populations (e.g., racial and ethnic subgroups, students with disabilities, English language learners), as these counts may impact various data reports for these subgroups. Guides for understanding these reports are available on the NYSED Level 2 Reporting page.

User accounts for L2RPT access are created and managed by the superintendent or charter school CEO or the superintendent’s or charter school CEO’s Delegated Account Administrator through the State Education Department’s Delegated Account System (SEDDAS) available via the NYSED Business Portal. Additional support for authorized users of SEDDAS can be found on the NYSED SEDDAS page and may also be provided by your Level 1 data center. NYSED, including IRS cannot provide permissions or access.

SIRS L2RPT Changes

Annually, IRS posts the EOY SIRS Data Reports document on the Verification and Certification page. Your dedicated district and Level 1 data coordinators use this information to ensure verification of data that is used for Accountability, Annual Outcomes, Attendance, BEDS, Course, CTE, Reasonableness, Staff, Assessments, Total Cohort, and UIAS in order to assist and enable superintendents and charter school leaders with certifying their data.

Due to Covid-19, the L2RPT SIRS Data Reports have been updated to reflect the USED waiver impacting accountability, the NYSED exemptions to graduation, and the cancellation of the 2019-20 State assessments, including June and August 2020 Regents examinations.

The 2019-20 EOY SIRS Data Reports grid is designed to assist with the review of data by identifying the report folder (Accountability, Annual Outcomes, Attendance, BEDS enrollment, Course, CTE, Reasonableness, Staff, Tested/Not Tested, Total Cohort, and UIAS) along with the focus or purpose of the report (Report Card, Accountability, Informational, Chronic Absenteeism, Student Data Reports for State Aid Funding, Program Office, APPR, Course Reporting, Perkins Funding, Data Gaps, PMF, State and federal reporting, Assessments, and Grad Rate).

The following reports will not be released and/or data will be purged for the 2019-20 SY:

The following report will have partial data released for the 2019 – 20 SY:

The following reports are released and auto refreshed for the 2019-20 SY. The shaded text indicates reports that must be certified for 2019-20 SY. All other reports are available for informational purposes and not required for certification.

NOTE: SIRS-360, 361, and 370 do not require BOCES certification for SY 2019-20. SIRS-321 Columns a - i, o, p should be certified. SIRS-309 and SIRS-202 will not require certification for SY 2019-20 only.

SIRS 2019-20 End of Year Certification statement:

School districts, charter schools, BOCES, and all reporting entities must certify the accuracy of the data as reported by the entity for the 2019-20 SY L2DW as of the August 21, 2020 data refresh and submit a completed 2019-20 EOY Statement of Certification of Verification Reports form. This certification form must be completed by the chief school officer via the Information and Reporting Services Data Exchange (IDEx) no later than September 4, 2020. The IDEx application is accessed through the NYSED Business Portal.

Public school districts must certify all the reports listed below. Charter schools must certify all reports except the SIRS 312 - BEDS Day Enrollment Verification Report for State Aid, SIRS 316 - BEDS Day Enrollment Verification Report for District PreK, and