September 9, 2015 at 2:00 PM - Special Population Committee Meeting

Discussion:  Call to order at 2:00 PM. Staff: David Ludwig, Wade Fruhling, Beth Kabes, Deb Hericks

Discussion:  Chair reviewed the SRS Mission/Vision/Beliefs. Advisory Committee to create a timeline for completion. SRS Director to report at each ESUCC meeting on progress.

Discussion:  The Illini Cloud has an interest in seeing the code/information on SRS to see if could provide direction for that project. Is it a possibility to copyright our product to protect us from others.

Discussion:  ESUCC to provide a resolution to Soliant when time appropriate in appreciation of their support. Soliant will continue to support project throughout the next year. Purchased a code repository (GitHub).

Discussion:  Chair discussed the IDEA grant and changes for 2016-2017. Discussed the ILCD changes that are forthcoming (competitive grant process). Can the ESUCC write a statewide innovative grant? Create options of what those grants could look like (align with state plan). Invite Steve Milliken to next Special Population meeting?

Discussion:  Parents Encouraging Parents (PEP) We will continue to discuss the possibility of moving the PEP Grant under the ESUCC. The IEP Facilitation training was part of this grant.

Discussion:  Discussion was held regarding the final financials and MIPS (tracking). Discussion was tabled for this year. New expenditure account code (4450) to track both revenue and expenditure.

Discussion:  Provided site demonstration at Statewide Meeting of Interim Program Schools and Special Purpose Schools on June 19th Met with Dean Folkers regarding integration with EdFi ADVISER project. Discussed how integration will work within this system AAP site will be included in the i3 (Investing In Innovation) Grant that ESUCC is applying for. The remainder of our development budget for this year will be spent on hiring a consultant to help ensure that we are awarded this grant. The i3 grant will improve the long-term sustainability of the AAP project.

Discussion:  Project Para moved to a new server in August. The pretests and posttests for all of the units have been redesigned to more efficiently interact with the database and also provide more security. All of the pages in the site have been updated to a new template that has a new look and takes advantage of newer HTML and CSS coding. The Progress Report for participants has been redesigned to make it easier for participants to see their current status. The commenting tool for users and instructors regarding specific activities and tests has been updated and is now easier to use. The Instructor Resources have been updated, providing an improved interface for managing groups and participants. This section uses fewer pages and is more efficient than the earlier version. Para Educator Conference will be held on October 29th in Kearney.

Discussion:  We added the last remaining Part C forms: Notice of Meeting (Part C), Notice of Annual Transition, Notice of Initial Evaluation and Assessment, Significant changes to the IFSP. Other improvements include: Reminder to address Physical Education on IEP, Expanded Special Education Statement on IEP, For the Notice of IEP/MDT meeting, we added a new system to identify which of the two meetings participants will be attending,Made further refinements to new NSSRS report. Part C forms have all been reviewed and approved by NDE Bennington and Northwest Schools have requested a data upload system. This will be good practice for developing a system that all schools can use. Provided 17 SRS trainings to ESUs, School Districts, and Colleges in August.

Discussion:  SRS Office continue to maintain the ILCD Staff Survey site. Our office emails the data (along with a summary) to school districts upon request

Discussion:  ESUCC Systems Analyst and SRS System Specialist 9-3-2015 SRS Web Development Time was spent taking inventory of all the program code Identifying/Learning operational process. Identifying the inter-machine communication between iep,iepweb02 and iepdata01. Identify operational processes and protocols on the SRS network. Deployed a private software repository owned by ESUCC on Github.com. All software code will live here Best way for programmers to communicate changes before code deployment (Cost $25/month) Developing disaster recovery plan. Secured operational use of hardware at ESU 3 for mirroring SRS process. Goal is to be down less than 2 hours in case of major outage. Backups Enhanced and deployed an extensive database backup process. Secured SRS machine images and deployed them on hardware at ESU3. Gives SRS the beginnings of a disaster recovery site. Allows the ESUCC techs to have a development site. (Important). Security Deployed SRS network along with other networks behind a Fortigate firewall. Deployed vpn to Soliant developers and others associated with open access to the SRS networks. Allows full access to servers for maintenance. A major security concern resolved. Need to identify access security concerns. Hardware Hardware is very old. Major concern being addressed is lack of disk space. Requires extensive planning for resolution: Not easy process to extend server disk images due to age/operation of virtualization software. Currently, there is no easy way to covert the existing Xen Virtualization environment to another Virualizaiton environment such as Microsoft or KVM. New hardware on way. Currently we are mocking up the new hardware on the ESU 3 hardware. Christmas would be a good time to move. In the meantime, the two environments at ESU3 will be hardware for the disaster recovery (mirror Lincoln) and the new hardware deployment. Software 5 main software being addressed. Zend 5.6. Php Postgresql Apache web server: Server operating systems are old. We will be moving from Centos 5.8 to Ubuntu 14.04. All upgrades are on hold until tested in development environment at ESU3. This is currently a major focus.

Discussion:  Invite Steve Milliken to Special Populations. Wade to demo AAP site.