When contacting the Datasupport help desk system, do not send any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) for any student or teacher. Although Datasupport uses https (secure hypertext transfer protocol), the [Contact us] form generates an email, which is NOT encrypted. Any unencrypted email can be intercepted by malicious parties and its contents can be read in plain text.
In general, email is not a secure method of transmittal unless it employs a specific protocol that encrypts the contents at the sender's end and requires a compatible decryption key at the receiver's end. If you do not know whether your email software has an encryption protocol, assume it does NOT.
To ensure compliance with the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and other privacy legislation, and in order for the NYSED Office of Information and Reporting Services or Level 1 data centers to query record(s) for review or to correct on your behalf, it is not necessary to send PII. Instead, provide only the data identified below.
For student data:
- Current NYSSIS ID, if known (10-digit statewide ID from the NYS Student Identification System)
OR - Local Student ID (9-digits or less, generated by the LEA's own student management system)
PLUS
- Building BEDS code of institution where enrolled (and BEDS code for the District of Responsibility if an out-of-district placement). A BEDS/SED code is a 12 digit location ID number assigned by the New York State Education Department. It can be searched for at https://portal.nysed.gov/pls/sedrefpublic/SED.sed_inst_qry_vw$.startup
- School year
For Teacher Staff/Administrator data:
- Teach ID
- Building BEDS code, A BEDS/SED code is a 12 digit location ID number assigned by the New York State Education Department. It can be searched for at https://portal.nysed.gov/pls/sedrefpublic/SED.sed_inst_qry_vw$.startup
- School year
Initial inquiries from LEAs should first go through the LEA's Regional Information Center (RIC) or Big 5 City School District data warehouse support center. This is the center with whom an LEA has contracted to submit institutional data on your behalf to the NYSED SIRS (Student Information Repository System, aka the Level 2 statewide data warehouse).
NYSED maintains various lists of support contacts on the RIC/Big5 Points of Contact page for all regional data centers. Support contacts for specific NYSED reporting applications (L2RPT, PD System, NYSSIS, etc.) are in the list labeled "Scanning/Answer Sheets and Data Warehouse Systems Contacts," which is arranged alphabetically by BOCES/RIC region.
If you are an institution that submits data without contracting directly with a RIC/Big5 CSD data center, you may inquire about data by clicking on the blue Help button at the bottom right of this screen, and using the [Contact us] email form is needed. Again, do NOT include PII here, as this generates an unencrypted email. Be sure to include only the preferred NYSED identifiers listed above in the [Contact us] form, then click the Send button. If you need to share PII, please ASK for a secure method to share that information with our office.