General Information
Background
The Comprehensive Exceptional Children Accountability System (CECAS) is a case management and data analysis system that will be offered to Local Education Authorities (LEAs), Charter Schools, and State-Operated Programs (SOPs) as a means to manage and analyze exceptional children data. This project customizes a commercial product to provide more efficient tracking of services for exceptional children. The application is a completely outsourced, web-based system. When this system begins phased implementation in September 2004, it will become the State's system of record for exceptional children data management.
Project Objectives
The following are the objectives for the CECAS project:
- Provide a case management/workflow-oriented application for Exceptional Children professionals around the state to automate the various processes involved in providing services to exceptional children,
- Provide schools, LEAs, and the Division of Exceptional Children with a system that eliminates redundant data collection and allows the efficient capture of statewide EC data, and
- Provide for the automatic generation, routing and approval of reports required by the State and Federal Government.
Core Capabilities
The system will track student information for over 200,000 EC students across school and district boundaries throughout the State. System highlights are shown below:
| Data Management Capability | Description |
|---|---|
| Student-level Data Collection | Maintain local, state, and federal required information on children served and service providers. |
| Individual Education Plan (IEP) Workflow Automation | Automation of the IEP and related forms and workflow compliance. |
| EC Standard Reports | Continuous Improvement Monitoring, Behavior Intervention Services, Compliance Reports, etc. |
| Ad-hoc data analysis | Allows complex data analysis and outcomes evaluation for EC students. |
| State and Federal Reports (Child Count, End-Of-Year) | Generate appropriate reports for state and federal needs. |
| Custom Data Elements | Districts and schools can add and independently manage custom data elements. |
CECAS will eventually integrate Early Intervention data for qualified children ages 0 to 3 years, regular education pre-referrals to special education from NCWISE and facilitate online Medicaid claims for EC-related services.
System Users
LEAs and Charter Schools will decide how they will implement CECAS. A school system can decide whether they want to be a CECAS daily user or only a CECAS reporting user. Daily users are school systems whose teachers maintain student information in CECAS on a regular basis. This information can include both demographic data and the IEP and other forms. CECAS will automatically generate Child Count and End-Of-Year reports for administrative verification.
Reporting users will typically use third-party software to manage their EC student data and will rely on CECAS at the district level to post their Child Count and End-Of-Year data to satisfy State and Federal reporting requirements. The CECAS Project Team has published an XML data exchange format for these third-party systems to generate data files that then can be uploaded into CECAS.