As a result of Act 82 and Pennsylvania’s Educator Effectiveness System, significant changes to the Pennsylvania Information Management Systems (PIMS) application are required. The proposed enhancements to the PIMS application were published for review and comment to all PIMS Administrators on June 6, 2013 requesting LEA comments to PDE by June 27, 2013. School Administrators were notified of upcoming changes to PIMS through a Penn*Link distributed June 17, 2013 titled “Instructions prep for LEA staff and info systems for school year (SY) 2013-14 enhancements to PIMS for PVAAS teacher reporting.” The finalized PIMS application changes follow this Penn*Link. The major portion of the PIMS enhancements are focused on making sure students are linked to the correct teachers for the Pennsylvania tested grades/subjects/courses to ensure accurate reporting of the proportion of instructional responsibility to PIMS.  

In an effort to help LEA’s prepare for this year’s changes, the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) has been providing webinars to help explain the changes and impact to various levels of LEA staff. LEA staff have been encouraged to begin advanced planning, including contacting their Student Information System vendor to discuss development of an overall plan for meeting SY 2013-14 PIMS data collections for educator effectiveness. Alignment of LEA Student Information Systems to PIMS as early as possible in SY 2013-14 will save LEA teachers and principals significant time, when they need to verify rosters for Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment System (PVAAS) teacher specific reporting in the spring of 2014. If LEA data provided to PIMS is accurate, teachers and principals will NOT need to search for students for PVAAS rosters, add students to rosters, remove students from rosters and/or change the percentage of instructional responsibility for each student. Again, advance planning by LEA staff will ensure this is a verification process and not a data correction or data entry process by LEA teachers and principals

At this time, PDE’s PIMS team is providing two opportunities for LEA staff to attend a webinar presenting the major changes to PIMS. LEA staff are being asked to invite their Student Information System (SIS) vendors to the web events listed below.  The webinar presenters will go over the major PIMS application changes which are listed below. The webinars do not replace the official release of the annual PIMS updates, but supplements the explanation.

Webinars:  – How to prepare your Student Information System for 2013-14 Annual PIMS Updates (Highly Qualified Teachers and Course Data Collection Revisions)

For District Technology/Data/Student Information System vendor staff)

August 6 – 1 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
August 7 – 1 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

To Join a Webinar – no registration is necessary!  

A link for joining a live webinar will become active 30 minutes prior to the scheduled start time. To join a session, go to http://vclass.cciu.org. Please contact PDE at ra-ddqdatacollection@pa.gov should participants experience difficulties in accessing this site or the webinar session. By default, the schedule of sessions will be displayed. Click through the pages of session titles until you see the title of the session you would like to join.

PIMS Application Changes:
This year’s PIMS changes will facilitate collecting and reporting, accurate and complete data for the Highly Qualified Teachers, the Educator Effectiveness and School Performance Profile Initiatives. Keep in mind; changes to the PIMS Data Warehouse are necessary to support both initiatives. Therefore, it is important to gain an understanding of future needs and to prepare LEA local systems for those needs.

* Student Course Enrollment template is being replaced with a new template – Staff Student Course  

o For 2013-14, the Highly Qualified Teachers and Course Data Collection revisions include LEA staff reporting the teacher’s percentage of instructional responsibility for each student enrolled in their courses. With the introduction of the Student Course Enrollment template changes in reporting will provide a direct link to the students enrolled in the teacher’s courses, the teachers instructing the course, and the concurrent enrollment of students and teachers, regardless of the student’s district of residence or the teacher’s employer. Students will need to be attributed to teachers for the courses students are enrolled.

o LEA staff are responsible for determining the formula to calculate the percentage of teacher instructional responsibility. This formula calculates the percentage of time the student and teacher are together in a course. For example, if the teacher and student are present for the entire course and the teacher is the only teacher, it is 100 percent. If the student is present for one-half of the course, and the teacher is present for the entire course, 50 percent of the student performance is attributed to the teacher.  Please note that this example is a relatively simple example. PDE is aware much more complicated scenarios exist in LEAs today. It is recommended LEA staff take the time to review the guidelines for calculating Instructional Responsibility posted on the SAS Inc. web site. The guidelines can be found in the FAQs document: https://pvaas.sas.com/. The potential complexity of calculating instructional responsibility, given the variety of factors that are to be considered, is an important concern from both administrative and technical perspectives.  

o PDE anticipates that SIS vendors will implement configurable solutions to assist LEA staff in applying the instructional percentage formula and reduce manual calculations. SIS vendors should consider additional data quality review reports to help streamline the SIS data review prior to data being uploaded to PIMS.  

Important considerations include:
        * STUDENTS:
            o IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT
            o OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL DISTRICT
        * TEACHERS:
            o IN THE SCHOOL DISTRICT
            o OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL DISTRICT
            o SINGLE INSTRUCTION
            o DUAL INSTRUCTION
            o PARTIAL INSTRUCTION
        * COURSES:
            o LENGTH OF TERM
            o NUMBER OF INSTRUCTIONAL DAYS
            o SNOW DAYS, IN-SERVICE DAYS

* In addition to the Percentage of Instructional Responsibility, changes are required for:

        1. Elementary Course Codes*
            a. New Elementary Course codes are required.
            b. A new course will be added to match each PSSA tested subject for grades at the elementary level.
            c. First Grade will remain with course code 0001 – First Grade.
            d. Second Grade will remain with course code 0002 – Second Grade.
            e. Third Grade through Sixth Grade will be separated into new course codes.

        2. Departmentalized Sixth Grade Course Codes*
            a. New course codes are required for reporting departmentalized sixth graders.
            b. New codes are designed to align to PSSA testing requirements.

        3. Keystone Courses*
            a. New course codes are required for reporting students in courses that result in the student taking a Keystone Exam

        4. Specialized Course Codes*
             a. New course codes are required for reporting students in the following courses:
                i. Special Education Course Codes
                ii. ESL Course Codes
                iii. Visually Impaired Course Codes
                iv. Hearing Impaired Course Codes
                v. Alternative Education Course Codes

        5. PVAAS Roles
            a. A new, required field in Staff and Staff Snapshot templates will be added for teachers, principals and CSAs (or their delegates) who are participating  
                in PVASS.  

        6. Email
            a. Professional email addresses preferred. These will be used to create PVAAS logins when applicable.

        7. Substitutes
            a. Substitute teachers who are not filling a vacancy may be reported in course data.
            b. Substitute teachers may also be the Teacher of Record for HQT reporting.

        8. Non-Core Content Courses
            a. In an effort to alleviate LEA burden, reporting of non-core content courses will be optional beginning with the 2013-14 school year.

For more information or questions, please contact: Data Collection Team, Pennsylvania Department of Education, Center for Data Quality and Information Technology at 717.705.3969 or Ra-DDQDataCollection@pa.gov.