For years, peo­ple have been talk­ing about the need for send­ing alerts in the con­text of a SIF frame­work when, in real­i­ty, the SIF spec­i­fi­ca­tion itself has very lit­tle to sup­port alert mes­sages except:

• in SIF 2.*, a med­ical alert ele­ment that may accom­pa­ny a Stu­dent­Per­son­al object
• in the NorthAmer­i­can SIF 3.* data mod­el, a gen­er­al pur­pose alert has been added to the med­ical alert for the Stu­dent object

There are two issues with the way these alerts are main­tained and trans­ferred in the con­text of a large orga­ni­za­tion (such as a state):

1. only stu­dents may have asso­ci­at­ed alerts (not schools, bus routes, teach­ers, etc.)
2. if the alert applies to a large num­ber of peo­ple or objects, indi­vid­ual objects need to be sent with updates for each of these peo­ple or objects and the receiv­er is nev­er sure when all the updates have been received

Objectives

At a dis­trict or state lev­el, there are many part­ners who may need to be alert­ed from time to time when events occur. Exam­ples of these orga­ni­za­tions might be local law enforce­ment, after school pro­grams, health and human ser­vices offices or offices of child pro­tec­tive services.

• These part­ners need to be able to receive alerts about stu­dents, teach­ers, schools, bus routes, or oth­er objects as they are happening
• The events may include com­bi­na­tions of objects (teach­ers and stu­dents, for example)
• The event trans­mis­sion must be very fast (one or two messages)
• The event mes­sage itself must con­tain no per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion, but must be eas­i­ly con­vert­ed into mean­ing­ful infor­ma­tion by the receiver
• Receiv­ing part­ners should only see infor­ma­tion about stu­dents and teach­ers about which they have a need to know

Proposal

The school orga­ni­za­tion would estab­lish a secure con­nec­tion to receiv­ing part­ner orga­ni­za­tion and, through the use of ele­ment-lev­el fil­ters, send the receiv­ing part­ner the infor­ma­tion they need to know about the entire stu­dent (or teacher, or school bus, …) pop­u­la­tion. This might include only a very small sub­set of the entire col­lec­tion of infor­ma­tion main­tained by the school dis­trict in the SIS. This trans­mis­sion of this sta­t­ic data would be done at the begin­ning of the school year or as changes are made to stu­dent records, but not as an emer­gency is hap­pen­ing. Includ­ed with each record would be a unique iden­ti­fi­er (a GUID) that would have no mean­ing to an out­side onlooker.

This mes­sage would be deliv­ered to receiv­ing part­ners who sub­scribed to alert events. These receiv­ing part­ners would receive infor­ma­tion about all events, even if they relat­ed to objects for which they did not main­tain detailed infor­ma­tion. This may pose pri­va­cy con­cerns (to be inves­ti­gat­ed fur­ther). If this is a con­cern, we may want to break up this object into sev­er­al dif­fer­ent objects, one for each class of alert, so that the ZIS can con­trol who sub­scribes to them.

The Alert Message