USBE to make invalid district/address validations fatal next year; districts warn rural addresses and bus routing could be affected

USBE staff briefed LEA data leads on plans to make certain Level‑2 address and district‑of‑residence validations fatal for the October submission period next school year and described technical approaches the state will use to validate physical addresses.

Staff said the state is using the Utah GRC (Geospatial Resource Center) API to validate addresses and that Google Plus codes or GPS coordinates will be accepted as alternative machine‑readable identifiers for locations that do not validate through standard street‑address data. USBE noted those alternate methods are being prioritized for rural districts where surveyors' datasets are incomplete and where addresses do not reliably geocode.

District participants raised operational concerns: many rural addresses are valid for mail delivery and bus routing but do not validate in Google or the state geospatial feed; replacing a human‑readable street address with a plus code in the address line could confuse parents or transportation staff and cause misrouting. Districts asked whether address line 2 could be used to preserve human directions while sending a validated code to UTracks; USBE said it is exploring options including rerunning validations using address line 2 as a fallback and convening deeper‑dive calls with affected SIS vendors and districts.

USBE told participants it will not add new data fields on short notice but encouraged SIS vendors and LEAs to create a geospatial field that can be used by their SIS to send a validated plus code or GPS coordinate into UTracks. USBE also invited LEAs with outlier cases to join a technical follow‑up meeting to help design implementation details.

Next steps: USBE will schedule follow‑up technical sessions with SIS vendors and affected LEAs, continue testing Google plus code and GPS ingestion, and communicate exact validation timing and rules ahead of the October finalization window.