PSS receives over $2M to develop advance data system

The Public School System has received a $2 million-plus grant from the State Longitudinal Data Systems to create an infrastructure that will link PSS data to early learning and the child care program that will give a complete look at the CNMI’s educational system from pre-school all the way to high school.

During Board of Education’s regular board meeting last week, Lynette Villagomez, PSS associate commissioner of Accountability, reported that PSS was awarded $2.7 million to develop a Longitudinal Data System, “which will provide funding to create an infrastructure for data linking from early learning and we can also link the child care program to PSS data. It basically provides the infrastructure. It will also provide funding for training and other activities that will support our stakeholders in using data for informed decisions, both in the classroom level as well as the district level,” she said.

Villagomez said this is a first for the CNMI to receive this grant, which is a highly competitive grant by the Institution of Education Sciences and the U.S. Department of Education to establish a State-Wide Longitudinal Data System, or SLDS.

Villagomez said the grant is good for four years and since the funding is already available to PSS, they are moving forward with the project.

The PSS project, “Advance CNMI: Leveraging Data Power for Greater Success,” will be implemented in phases to set the foundation for a sophisticated information system that drives data usage to support decision-making at multiple levels from classroom instruction to district policies.

The two primary goals of the project are to establish an infrastructure by connecting K-12 Longitudinal Data Systems with Head Start and Early Head Start SLDS and to shift the use of data from compliance to accountability and strategic instructional usage.

Achieving these two objectives will take four years, beginning this year and through 2024. The long-term goal is to establish an SLDS infrastructure for the CNMI and to move the use of data beyond the isolated reporting for compliance to an integrated system driven by accountability and focused on enhancing student learning.

The first year will focus on hiring the key personnel and establishing the SLDS infrastructure.

Years 2 through 4 will concentrate on creating the data architecture and system design, establishing a stakeholder engagement plan, sustainability plan, and training.

After Year 4, efforts will focus on linking the data systems with postsecondary institutions—Northern Marianas College and Northern Marianas Technical Institute—and workforce departments’ Department of Labor, Public Health, the Workforce Investment Agency, etc. This will allow the CNMI to use integrated data to make data-informed decisions for future research and planning.

The SLDS will be a central hub of student data where research-based queries can be made by stakeholders to draw out quantitative insights that can be used to tailor instructional approaches, inform community partners about at-risk populations, guide leaders in the creation of policies, and ultimately narrow achievement gaps.