WISE Project
In February 2004 the Legislature authorized funding for the WISE project. In December
2004 a Request for Proposal (RFP) was released and in January and February 2005
vendor responses and presentations were heard and the contract was awarded to ESP
Solutions Group for the SIF implementation and to eScholar for the WISER ID Uniq
ID system. Following the assignment of the contract to ESP Solutions Group and eScholar
the Wyoming Department of Education procured and installed the hardware to support
the implementation of WISE. The hardware consists of a Zone Integration Server (ZIS)
and a State Report Manager (SRM). Each of the eight regions has one ZIS and one
SRM to support the associated districts. In most cases, one box will support both
software systems. Edustructures (a contractor from ESP Solutions Group) has been
working with districts to bring them up on the Student Locator Agent (SLA) and SRM
by the fall of 2005. The SLA is one piece of the total WISE data system. It allows
districts to retrieve WISER IDs from the state and populate it back into the district
student information system (SIS). The SRM is another piece of the total WISE data
system and allows the districts to report vertically to the state, either through
their SIS agent to the SRM without much manual intervention or by a CSV file to
the SRM, both methods use SIF to do the vertical reporting to the state. The goal
was to have all districts up on both the SLA and the SRM by mid-November 2005. The
goal of November 2005 was met and in February 2006, the PAWS precode file was reported
vertically to the State. This same method of vertical reporting was successfully
used in April 2006 for the WDE 671 data, in October 2006 for the enrollment data
with the Teacher-Class-Student (TCS) report to the state, in December 2006 for the
WDE 425 data (CSV only), and then again in January of 2007 for WDE 684 data. This
form of vertical reporting will now be the standard for all reports from Districts
to the State for both State and Federal reporting.
For the school year 2006-07, the planned WISE activity included, but was not limited
to; implementation of horizontal SIF agents in the individual Districts. This would
be accomplished by using the framework created by the District Surveys, these survey’s
were completed in the summer of 2006 by each District and administered by Edustructures.
As the District surveys are received Edustructures will then work with each specific
District to develop a unique horizontal SIF implementation plan for each, to then
begin implementation.
The remaining years of the WISE project will include the implementation of horizontal
SIF agents within the Districts to reduce the burden on individual school Districts
in the areas of Library systems, Transportation systems, School lunch systems, Human
Resource/Finance systems, Directory systems, and Instructional Management systems.
The project will also focus on the horizontal/vertical implementation of the WISE
Student Record Exchange.
WISE Student Record Exchange (SRE):
The next statewide evolution of the WISE project will encompass the implementation
of the WISE project SRE into the Wyoming Transcript Center (WTC), with our vendor
partners ESP and the National Transcript Center (NTC)٭. The WTC will enable Districts
to exchange student records across Districts, as well as, with Postsecondary Institutions
throughout the country.
*The Proof of Concept District,
Fremont #25, has been able to successfully transfer student records to the NTC via
conversion from a SASIxp CSV file to SPEEDE/ExPRESS, EDI, and PESCI XML using the
SIF 2.0 specification. WDE envisions this implementation to greatly reduce the time
between student record transfers and student enrollments in different schools. This
will also be a valued asset in the tracking of student records for the Hathaway
Scholarships.*