To download the District Data Request Workbook Excel file:

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  Click here to DOWNLOAD the file.

Detailed Explanations of Required District Information
Click on the section you want to know more about, or scroll down to read the entire document.

Teacher and Student Attendance
Suspensions and Explusions
California Safe Schools Assessment
Finance: Compensation
Finance: School Site Level Budgets

Purpose

The purpose of this section is simply to let your parents know an obviously important dimension of your schools' health: are teachers coming to work regularly, and are students attending. Note that the Public School Accountability Act of 1998 called for this being included in the Academic Performance Index. Your reporting this now is a wise anticipation of the mandated reporting close at hand.

Suggestions

Please provide your schools' CDS codes, as well as their names, when you prepare this material. For student attendance, please count excused and unexcused absences as absences. This is consistent with the revision last year to attendance reporting for ADA. For teacher attendance, please provide whatever detail you have easily available to help our staff understand your calculations. Be sure to include some notation for how you handle partial day absences, and whether you are including all teachers in your calculations.

Data Requested and Date Range of Statistics

Please provide this teacher and student attendance information for the 2000-2001 academic year.

Format

Spreadsheet format of any type is fine. We'd prefer separate spreadsheets for teachers and students, however. Each school should be one row, preferably, and attendance categories should be in your columns.

Purpose

There are only a few facts that begin to make classroom discipline practices clear to a parent. The record of suspensions and expulsions is one of them.

Suggestions

You may, of course, detail types of suspensions in your data: after-school, Saturday school, etc. If your district uses in-school expulsions, or reassigns expelled students to other schools, please let us know.
This data will be presented adjacent to each of your principals' narrative description of the general climate for learning. In addition, School Wise Press will provide some precautions for the parent, making clear the limited meaning of this information. Stricter principals will result in higher numbers of suspensions and expulsions, for example.

Data Requested and Date Range of Statistics

Please provide this information about suspensions and expulsions for three years, as required by the Education Code: the 2000-2001 academic year, and the two prior years.

Format

Please provide this information in spreadsheet format. Each school should comprise one row. Suspensions and expulsions should all be included in a single spreadsheet, however.

Purpose

Your district has, of course, filed this report for three consecutive years. But you may have elected to file it only summary information for the entire district. School Wise Press recommends including your site specific CSSA results because we believe the data will help calm parents' often unfounded concerns that your schools are less safe than the neighborhoods they sit within.

Suggestions

If your district includes high schools, we suggest that this information is of the highest order of relevance to your public.

Data Requested and Date Range of Statistics

The data is simply the information your district provided to the California Safe School Assessment: reported crimes against property and persons. Please provide this information for the 2000-2001 academic year.

Format

You may simply provide us with the CSSA filing forms your district filed last year, as long as they are school site level specific. However, you may also provide this information in spreadsheet format.

Purpose

To meet the Education Code requirement that teacher pay, principal pay and superintendent pay all be public knowledge.

Suggestions

This should be easily calculated for the 2000-2001 academic year by your finance department.

Data Requested and Date Range of Statistics

The data needed is as follows:

• Beginning, median and highest salary paid to teachers in the district.
• Average salary for school-site principals
• Superintendent's salary
• Percent of the district's budget allocated to teachers' salaries
• Percent of the district's budget allocated to administrators' salaries
• Please provide this information for the 2000-2001 academic year.

Format

Please provide this information in spreadsheet format.

Purpose

• The budget for each school will differ, based on the needs of the students at that school, the seniority of the teaching staff, and other factors. Parents should be able to understand the way in which school budgets differ.

Suggestions

You may not have this information readily available in your accounting system. The district reporting requirements indeed don't mandate this. But if your district is one that summarizes categorical funds at the school site level, then this is the moment to share that with your public. Note, too, that the Education Code asks that you describe the types of services funded. This should be possible, regardless of the availability of site level expenditure data.

Data Requested and Date Range of Statistics

The data needed is the estimated expenditures per student, and the types of services funded. Those services include GATE, special education, English immersion or ESL, even transportation. If you have this information as the site budget, rather than as actual expenditures, that is a suitable substitute. Please provide whatever detail is available. Our staff can do the calculations to arrive at a per-student equivalent.

Please provide this information for the 2000-2001 academic year.

Format

Please provide this information in spreadsheet format.

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