Staff and Student-Centered Aspects Curriculum Summary
California schools are made up of 6.2 million students in 58 counties. There are 1024 school districts in California which make up 10,000 schools and approximately 6.2 million students.
Keeping track of student and staff records is one of the most important aspects of maintaining a school district. Records such as demographics, academics, attendance, assessment, and behavior are all essential and determine much of a district’s funding. Staff records are also important in that keeping track of demographics, position, pay, retirement, benefits, credentials and family members is also important as these factors all contribute to the cost and maintenance of running a school district.
Other factors that contribute to funding for districts is CALPADS. CALPADS monitor whether state funds are improving education or not and require districts to provide information to parents, community and researchers. CALPADS also satisfies the state and federal reporting requirements.
As districts are required to keep and maintain general records, they are separated into three classifications. Class 1 Permanent, Class 2 Optional and Class 3 Disposable. Class 1 records involve annual reports, official actions, property, and personnel. Class 2 records are kept for the purposes of retention and not required by law, are usually only temporarily preserved. This could include canceled checks and job applications. Class 3 records involve audits and periodic reports and should be retained for three years.
Mandatory Permanent, Mandatory Interim and Permitted are the three classifications of pupil records. Examples of Mandatory Permanent records are DOB, credits, and graduation. Examples of Mandatory Interim include health information and standardized test scores and example of Permitted records include discipline and parental responses and should be kept for six months or until the student withdraws.
These guidelines also pertain to pupil transfers. New schools may request records from the old school and must be provided within ten days. Many school districts are now digitizing school records and may destroy the paper copies once records are digitized. These records must be on an approved type of film, must be approved by the Superintendent, must be conveniently accessible and preserved permanently and the original record is required by any audit cannot be destroyed prior to two years after it was digitized.
Districts in California are also required to maintain transparency through the CA Public Records Act (CPRA). This act allows the public to request certain records maintained by the school district.
School districts are also now required to follow federal and state laws pertaining to student privacy. The term student privacy falls under three main components: confidentiality, security, and privacy. These laws protect student information from being disclosed to unauthorized or intended parties and are designed to protect against personal intrusion without the individual or parental consent. Districts are also obligated to notify parents of these rights.
There are many aspects to maintaining all types of records for school districts and the guidelines and laws mentioned above are all required in order to maintain compliance with state and federal agencies.