Oklahoma WAVE Reporting Update
10/4/2024
13 years ago SchoolInsight received SIF certification, and with it the ability to submit information to the WAVE. We have been serving OK customers ever since. Every year we make updates to meet state requirements and add new features.
This year’s changes have been much larger than usual. Essential underlying technology used by the WAVE, SIF 2.0r1, reached “end of life” and had to be replaced. So the OSDE (and all other SIF 2.0r1 users) were required to update to a supported version of SIF. Technically the change was considerable, and forced major rewrites of software that had been working for years: the WAVE, SchoolInsight, and every other SIS vendor’s software.
We have been working closely with the OSDE, and the update is similar to building brand new software. It required throwing away many years of testing, feature improvement, and bug fixes. The software is new, and will take time to mature. We are prioritizing development resources to speed up this process, as much as possible.
For SchoolInsight, we made significant changes to support the new WAVE version:
We support all the new fields and data changes in the WAVE.
We rebuilt our State Verify page, to give users a good interface to identify errors/warnings prior to pushing data to the WAVE
We added “Edit” functionality to allow users to easily change data for each error/warning. This is available both within the Verify UI and on Students-Single View(beta).
We are rebuilding Student Mass Edit to enter data for many students at once.
We’ve heard similar stories from other vendors, and from the WAVE. Everyone is going through growing pains with the SIF upgrade.
In addition to core technology changes, the data tracked by the Wave has been expanded. The largest change is to student program enrollment. Historically program enrollments were tracked with a simple yes/no. Is the student enrolled in the program, or not? Now the OSDE requires additional information for students enrolled in many of these programs.
An example of this is the Bilingual field. Notice how the UI has expanded from a yes/no into a list of placement reason, effective date, exit date, and exit reason. For students in each program, this information is not present in SchoolInsight, and will need to be entered. This will likely require significant labor/effort.
This year, instead of entering data for a few new students, districts must update ALL existing program enrollments for students in programs. To ease program data entry, we’re introducing the Student Program Mass Entry page. Instead of navigating to each student, admins can view all students at once, filter the grid to show only students previously enrolled in the program, and enter the additional program information – all from a single page. We believe this will considerably speed up data entry. We plan to release this new tool early next week.
While Mass Edit has traditionally been a good tool for these moments, in this case the data (e.g. entry date, exit date, etc) is typically unique per student, and not easily mass editable. We’ll be updating it shortly, but it won’t be part of the initial release.
In addition to product changes, our Technical Services Organization(TSO) will engage to help customers. OSDE recently extended the state reporting deadline to 10/31 (from 10/1). We’re grateful that districts have additional time, and we want to help them take advantage of it. Starting Monday, we will reach out to every public OK customer and offer free 1:1 troubleshooting and training sessions. Our goal is to walk through WAVE errors together and make sure customers know how to resolve them.
We hope these changes make this year’s state reporting easier and reduce the stress on our customers. We have several other state reporting projects in the works, keep an eye on the news page for more details.
The Common Goal Team