Special Education Data System Design

Tennessee’s Early Intervention System consists of a central state office that coordinates and supervises the functions of nine district offices. Within these districts is an array of service providers that deliver services at the local level to the families and children. The information needs are great when facing the challenge of administering and coordinating such an intricate system of services. This awareness drove the decision to develop the new data system. We are currently in the exciting phase of statewide implementation of this system. The Tennessee Early Intervention Data System (TEIDS) was developed as a Web based data system. The purpose of TEIDS is to help provide a critical flow of information within a dynamic hierarchy of administrative entities at the agency, district, and statewide levels. The reality is that many local and state report needs will be available at the click of a button.

There are several goals of the Tennessee Early Intervention Data System. TEIDS will be utilized by the nine TEIS points of entry offices, their service providers, and the Department of Education staff. This system will be used to track children, birth to three, as they enter and progress through the Part C of IDEA system. An additional focus of the system is the availability to further track these children as they move through their educational experience. The system linkage to other state data systems will allow for the long term tracking of educational outcomes for the children who participated in Tennessee’s Early Intervention System.

Tennessee’s Early Intervention Data System will produce critical information at the state, regional, district and agency level. The system will provide useful accountability information about areas of need, as well as being the life source for the continued operation of this system. Tennessee is in a unique position to begin to analyze performance and quality of Individualized Family Service Plans, in order to best affect Child and Family Outcomes resources.

How does the TEIDS data system help on the 14 indicators in the determination table?

Basically TEIDS allows Tennessee to develop a cohesive system of general supervision. All site monitoring activities and survey activities are now linked with TEIDS. The information and reporting from TEIDS are used to do a risk assessment of Agencies/Districts/Counties and target (in a real time approach) the actual compliance areas and non-compliant areas. In the old processes with old monitoring efforts with outdated data system, Tennessee often monitored all programs in an in depth manner with little help from our data system in identifying the SPP compliance issues. In general before TEIDS, Tennessee spent many dollars and man-hours at the state and local level to find problems, which left little time or resources to solving these problems. TEIDS provides a life source of information related to SPP compliance issues. Tennessee knows the instances and details related to SPP Indicator Non- compliance at the State, Regional, District, County, Agency and even staff member level. This ability to identify the problem and the Actual point of accountability allow the State to concentrate the rest of our efforts on assuring the correction on non-compliance. This is a huge shift, in the past they were never able to focus their resources on correction, and quite simply the same issues showed over and over and over again. This outdated system of data collection, monitoring and general supervision is no longer acceptable to Tennessee’s leadership. More importantly with the letter of determinations being sent to states, it is no longer acceptable from OSEP’s perspective as well. TEIDS positions Tennessee to correct the areas that “Need Intervention.” Without TEIDS, Tennessee would be facing continued federal scrutiny and possible enforcement action. We welcome your states learning more about how Yahasoft inc. can assist you in addressing SPP reporting and compliance issues.

Following are some sample reports and screen shots of this Early Intervention Data System: