Key Considerations When Gathering and Reporting Career Education Data
Contact: Katie Graham (402-471-3104 or [email protected]) The Programs Fact template includes data for grades 7-12 in schools that offer Career Education courses. Career Education “Participants” are determined during the current program year (July 1, 2016-June 30, 2017). Concentrators are determined by evaluating the number of courses in which the student has earned credit throughout the 9-12 high school experience within a specific career cluster (program code). No student can concentrate in the CEFOUND program code. Students may have multiple Programs Fact records if participating in and/or concentrating in more than one program code.
Additional Information: 1. Who is considered a CTE Concentrator? A CTE Concentrator is a student in grades 9-12 who has completed three (3) or more one semester-long coursers within a single career cluster. NOTE: The three or more one semester-long courses do not need to follow a Program of Study course sequence, but rather fall under the same career cluster umbrella of courses.
2. When do I report a student as a CTE Concentrator? Concentrators should be reported when they are in 12th grade. Each student’s high school course history (transcript) should be examined to see if, at any point in his or her high school career, he or she met the criteria for becoming a Concentrator as defined above. NOTE: If you report a student as a concentrator before he or she is in the 12th grade, NSSRS will send you an alert letting you know that NDE will be counting that student as a CTE Participant. You should report this student as a Concentrator again once they reach the 12th grade. NDE has found in looking back that not all 12th graders reported as Concentrators before grade 12 were reported again their senior year. To resolve this issue, NDE is devising a protocol to explore 4 years of reported student participation identification to ensure any students not re-reported as a Concentrator in 12th grade is identified and included in year-end reporting.
3. What do I do if a student Concentrates in multiple areas? If a student has more than one area of concentration, the schools have two options: (1) the school can report all areas of concentration for each student. NDE will then utilize an internal strategy to determine in which area he or she will be counted (as we only report one area of concentration per student to the federal government), or (2) the school can select one area of concentration to report. NOTE: If a school decides to make the decision as to which area of concentration (of multiple) to report for a single student, we suggest you select the area for which the student has earned the most course credits or completed the most courses.