Q&A
Addressing enrollment data discrepancies between DOE and providers
0:50:25
·
3 min
Council Member Rita Joseph and Deputy Chancellor Simone Hawkins discuss the discrepancies in enrollment data between the Department of Education and providers, particularly focusing on the case of Nuestros Niños.
- DOE relies on the vendor portal (pre-kids) as the system of record for enrollment data
- Providers are responsible for entering accurate enrollment data into the system
- DOE considers enrollment data from multiple years, not just the current fiscal year
- Support is provided to programs that consistently fall below 95% enrollment
Simone Hawkins
0:50:25
Sorry, did I miss your question chair?
Rita Joseph
0:50:28
Sorry.
0:50:28
I
Simone Hawkins
0:50:29
sorry, may you please restate it?
Rita Joseph
0:50:32
Earlier the provider said you only claimed that they had four students while they had 96 students enrolled and that was one of the driving factors in closing their sites.
Simone Hawkins
0:50:43
Correct.
0:50:44
And so I just want to address something you said previously.
0:50:46
So you did raise the issue of the the vacant site in your district and I do recall responding to that diligently and also addressing that I think this issue has come up with a few other council members about vacant sites in their communities.
0:50:59
Yep.
0:50:59
And I have equally been responsive and so I hope that has been demonstrated through and through and I look forward to continuing the conversations about what we can do with the Flatbush site.
0:51:09
And so we rely like many of us on our systems of record and so vendor portal pre kids is our system of record for our CBO partners.
0:51:20
It is their responsibility and their requirement to enter enrollment records into the systems.
0:51:27
It is the same responsibility for our public school or district school rather principals who are required to do so in ATS.
0:51:34
And so we looked at our system, we saw that four kids were included and entered into the system, and right after our conversations in January started with these programs, the entering of the enrollment records increased dramatically.
0:51:50
And so again I want to remind the council that although that claim has come up, we do rely on the records, it is the responsibility of the provider, but we also enrollments from prior years.
0:52:03
And so the decision was not reliant solely on FY '25, but we looked at years prior and it did not meet our standard of full enrollment which is at 95.
0:52:13
And so we looked at that year over year for all five locations and all but one consistently was significantly under 95%.
Rita Joseph
0:52:23
And when you see these things, is there a team that reaches out to the provider and say, hey I'm not seeing your numbers, you're giving me this number, but that's not what I'm seeing in the system?
0:52:32
Is there a tech is there a support provided for providers when you're not there's a discrepancy?
Simone Hawkins
0:52:38
So we wouldn't know it's a discrepancy unless it was reported to us by a provider.
0:52:42
Again, this is our system of record so we rely on the provider to enter accurate data into the system in which we are looking.
0:52:48
Again, we are managing over 3,000 sites and programs.
0:52:52
And so in the case that we do enrollments at 95%, there are a host of supports provided to programs and again these are independent businesses, right.
0:53:02
So we respect that things are happening in community.
0:53:05
I think one thing we learned in conversation recently with many of the providers and one of the things I raised in my testimony is that they don't necessarily have the right seat configurations for the communities that they're serving today.
0:53:19
We wouldn't know that.
0:53:21
The needs assessment and the assessment of demand and community is done by the provider.
0:53:26
I had to do that when I was serving across and supporting those 14 sites.
0:53:31
They are steeped in community, something we keep hearing and so if at any point they're seeing that maybe whatever they were awarded initially five years ago, a year ago because all of the contracts are different on different terms, we do look to them encourage and encourage them to reach out to us to have those conversations.
0:53:48
Conversations.