State Reporting Improvements for Oklahoma

State Reporting Improvements for Oklahoma

7/10/2026

School districts are required to submit many reports to their state’s Department of Education.  They typically rely on their Student Information System (SIS) to generate those reports.  As a company, we spend significant effort making “best in class” state reports for SchoolInsight.  We recently released nice improvements for Oklahoma customers, and will make similar improvements to other states in the future. 

Historically, as SchoolInsight users prepare for state reporting, we provide good analytics to help them meet state requirements.  We identify data that will cause errors when submitted to the state, and provide nice UI’s to edit the data.  This has worked well for many years in various states.

To give an example, in Oklahoma we show how many errors/warnings exist on each SIF entity reported to the state’s “Unity” system.  This is one of our newer state reporting implementations.

Users can expand a report to see the individual errors.  In the example below, the student “Michael Adams” (not a real person) is missing necessary information for state reports.

We offer a nice UI to easily update each student’s data.  For students in Oklahoma, errors are shown in YELLOW.

While this has worked well historically, the solution is not perfect.  One challenge customers face is the separation of duties around student data.  It’s common for one employee to be responsible for managing a process with associated data (e.g. - ELL, special services, federal school lunch, etc), while another employee submits data to the state.  Even though the processes may have run successfully all year, the data may NOT be of sufficient fidelity for the state.  The two employees often need to collaborate and clean up the data for state reporting, which can be a large effort later in the year.

After thoughtful consideration, we believe this situation is likely exacerbated by the lack of state reporting logic on our data entry pages.  Our existing pages don’t have nice YELLOW warning messages that tell users when data doesn’t meet state requirements.  For users not familiar with state reporting rules, they unknowingly create state reporting errors as they enter student data.  They are often surprised by the data clean up effort later in the year. 

This release’s big improvement is to implement state reporting logic on our Student Edit pages for Oklahoma districts.  The system shows YELLOW warning messages when a field will generate errors in state reporting.  This helps employees understand whether the data is good enough for state reporting.  If not, they can collaborate to get the data right.  This should improve the district’s data quality at time of entry, and reduce the end of year cleanup required.

For example, we implemented warning messages on the Demographics tab.  Now users will see the messages long before they attempt to submit data to the state.

Notice that our messages are YELLOW warnings, and not RED errors.  This allows users to save without resolving the issues (RED errors must be fixed prior to saving).  In this way we can “nudge” users to fix long-term issues, but not require them to fix it right now.  Our goal is to educate without forcing change, resulting in higher quality data earlier in the process.

Users can now edit all fields on Students - Single View.  Click on the edit icon at the top of any table. We also reorganized the fields in a thoughtful way, and cleaned up some of the suboptimal decisions we made along the way.  This is likely the most obvious change in the release.

The upgrades are for fields editable inside Students - Single View.  We intend to put yellow messages on nearly every UI on the site, but this is a larger project.  So we started with Students.  Expect more over time.

These improvements were released to Oklahoma customers only.  The state has just implemented a new state reporting system (Unity), and our software development investment should have good longevity.  We’ll roll out similar improvements to other states over time.

We hope that users like these new improvements.

The Common Goal Team