The original Mississippi Student Information System (MSIS) was created in 2000 to meet the data collection and reporting needs of the state’s public school districts and the Mississippi Department of Education. The reporting obligations came from state and federal funding authorities in addition to other legal/regulatory requirements.
In the years following MSIS’s launch, data collection and reporting demands placed on the system outpaced its capacity to handle them. In 2019, the MDE began an effort to document existing and anticipated stakeholder needs to prepare for the development of a modernized student information system.
The result of that work is the MSIS 2.0 project guided by seven goals:
- Accept school and district data in near real-time to provide stakeholders with timely, actionable information;
- Simplify data submission processes to increase accuracy while decreasing human effort;
- Establish data and data transfer standards (using Common Education Data Standards) allowing the systems to communicate with each other automatically and efficiently;
- Increase transparency by showing districts how their data are used to inform reporting, accountability, and funding processes;
- Automate processes using integrated technologies to increase timeliness, reliability, and consistency in reporting, allowing districts to learn more from their data;
- Support local education decision makers with improved data and analysis available through new, secure dashboards;
- Adapt to changing school environments and future requirements by providing longitudinal data insights.
These goals were developed after lengthy discussions with stakeholders – in particular, school and districts-level personnel – about their “pain points” associated with the use of MSIS 1.0 (as the legacy system is now described).
In 2022, World Wide Technology, Inc.(WWT), was selected as the MSIS 2.0 vendor. WWT is working closely with districts’ own vendors (Central Access, PowerSchool, etc.), with district staff (technology directors, MSIS coordinators, etc.), and other partners to help MDE’s Office of Technology and Strategic Services (OTSS) design and build a system that will not only meet today’s data collection and reporting requirements but also be able to face the unknown challenges of the years to come.
MDE plans to launch MSIS 2.0 in the summer of 2024.