LEA presenters urge closer USBE‑district collaboration, pilot testing and fewer blocking 'fatal' errors

Two local education agency presenters used the USBE data meeting to press for closer collaboration between districts and the state, describe internal testing practices and urge reconsideration of how 'fatal' errors are handled in state validation.

Stacy Gom, SIS director for Cache County School District, gave a nine‑point talk on lessons learned in state reporting. She encouraged district staff to stay engaged in state data meetings, read UTRX specifications regularly, volunteer for pilots (USIMS/PowerSchool pilots were credited with preventing rollout problems), and welcome audits for external review. Gom criticized the term "fatal error," saying it creates unnecessary alarm; she suggested treating many issues as actionable feedback and reserving blocking labels for the narrowest set of problems. "I do not love the vernacular 'fatal error'," she said, adding that many fatal‑label items are problems that need attention but that alternate workflows could avoid harming students or teachers.

David Williams of Davis School District described the operational advantages of owning an SIS and ETL pipeline (Encore). He said owning the pipeline allows Davis to investigate nightly submissions, fix logic, resubmit quickly, and implement legislative or specification changes with fewer vendor delays. He highlighted daily tasks (checking nightly submissions, resolving membership and code mismatches, and making manual resubmissions when required) and emphasized collaboration and sharing of best practices across districts.

Address validation and district‑of‑residence issues: in advanced training, Riley explained that the state's UGRC geocoding service is the source of truth for residence validation and that the validation order favors GPS coordinates or open‑location codes before physical address fields. He advised districts to use geocodes or GPS fields when UGRC fails to recognize street/ZIP combinations and warned against changing a student's district of residence solely to suppress validation errors because funding and accountability are tied to residence.

Bottom line: presenters urged more two‑way communication between USBE and LEAs (focus groups, pilot testing), recommended local audits and proactive data hygiene and asked USBE to consider less disruptive labeling for warnings that do not block essential services such as assessment access.