Implement, Improve and Expand Your Statewide Longitudinal Data System: Creating a Culture of Data in Education

CHAPTER 10

Expanding Your SLDS: Adding Out-of-School Time and Health-Care Data

Longitudinal data on each student, detailing academic and testing information from preschool through K–12 and beyond, present an important step forward for most data systems and enable new and useful research to be done. However, it still doesn’t present the most comprehensive view of each child. To gain insight into each child’s situation—the complex interplay of all of the factors in the student’s world that might encourage or inhibit academic success—still more data must be included in the longitudinal data system. Many other data systems, such as health and human services, juvenile justice and social services, can be linked to provide a better view of the student. In this chapter, we discuss two vital datasets necessary to get a 360º view of the child: out-of-school time (OST) and health-care data.

Out-of-school time (OST) data detail what students do when they’re not in school. While much can be done (and is done) in the classroom to prepare students to succeed in college and in a career, there are only seven hours in the school day, and what happens in those hours not spent in school can impact a student’s outcome. According to IES (Institute of Education Sciences), OST is “an opportunity to supplement learning from the school day and provide targeted assistance to students whose needs extend beyond what they can receive in the classroom.”1 Further, knowledge of what goes on after school could ...