USBE to validate student physical addresses with Utah GRC API; will accept GPS/plus codes for rural and nonstandard locations

Cliff (identified in the meeting) described a planned enhancement to Utrecks validation that will check student physical addresses against the Utah Geospatial Resource Center (GRC) and, where appropriate, accept GPS coordinates or Google plus codes as alternative, machine-validated location formats for rural or nonstandard addresses.

Cliff said the address checks are currently issued as warnings and will become an obligation starting in August with the new school year. "We're simply trying to make sure that this is something that can be used by other programs such as CMP," he said, explaining the goal is to enable delivery and program eligibility by verifying a physical location. He also acknowledged cases where the GRC will not recognize very new addresses and described homebrew alternatives (GPS decimal degrees, DMS, or Google plus codes) that USBE will validate internally.

The team addressed common operational questions: for homeless students, Cliff recommended using a school or district point of contact when no fixed address exists; confidential addresses (victim-protection cases) can remain as stale 'last known' addresses with forwarding handled by the protection program and do not conflict with planned validations; PO boxes are not an acceptable physical address per current legislation.

Cliff committed to sharing technical API details, plus-code formatting guidance and corner-point coordinate lists with technical contacts, to investigate inconsistent warning behavior reported by some LEAs, and to provide follow-up documentation and meetings to support LEA implementation. He emphasized that validation failures can become nonloading errors that prevent assessments and funding being applied for students until fixed.