About the Data

This page explains, in plain language, what the Rochester City School District Community Transparency Dashboard shows, where the numbers come from, and how student privacy is protected. It is written for parents, students, and community members.

What this dashboard shows

The dashboard presents district and school level information that the community has asked for, grouped into a few plain topics:

• Enrollment and demographics. How many students are enrolled, and the share who are English language learners or who have an individualized education program.
• Academic achievement. State assessment proficiency in English language arts and mathematics, along with graduation and college and career readiness.
• Attendance and engagement. Average daily attendance and the share of students who are chronically absent, with daily trends by school.
• Behavior and school climate. Suspensions per 100 students, and results from the social and emotional and climate surveys.
• Multi Tiered System of Supports. How students are distributed across universal, targeted, and intensive support, and whether interventions are helping.
• Community schools. Referrals to partner organizations, whether those referrals were completed, and how much service was delivered.

Everything shown is a group total

This dashboard only ever shows aggregates. An aggregate is a group total or average, such as a school attendance rate or a district graduation rate. No individual student record is ever shown here, and no one viewing this site can see or reach a single student. The underlying student information stays inside the district data platform, and only group level totals are published to this public page.

How small groups are protected

Even a group total can risk a student privacy if the group is very small. To prevent that, the district applies small group suppression before any number reaches this site:

• Minimum group size. When a group would describe fewer than the district minimum of 10 students, the value is withheld and the dashboard shows a ≤10 mark in its place — a shield, on every table, chart and summary where it occurs. It is never shown as a zero, because zero would be a real and possibly revealing value, and no sign-in anywhere reveals it.
• Complementary suppression. Sometimes a single hidden value could be worked out by subtracting the visible values from a published total. When that is possible, the district also hides one or more additional values so the small group cannot be recovered by arithmetic. This is why you may occasionally see more than one value suppressed in the same table.
• Totals are published, not re-added here. Every figure on this site is a total the data platform published and protected. The site does not add up the smaller groups behind a total, because adding up the visible ones and quietly leaving out the hidden ones would produce an undercount that looks like a complete number.

Suppression is applied at the source, inside the data platform, so withheld values never leave it. Wherever you see the ≤10 mark on the dashboard, that protection is working as intended — it is the part of the system you can see.

A blank is not always a suppression

Some figures are blank because there is nothing to report, not because anything was hidden. A closed-loop referral rate, for example, is the share of referrals that ended in a confirmed service — so if a school opened no referrals at all inside the period you have selected, there is no rate to calculate.

Those two cases look different on purpose, and they are told apart by more than color. A withheld value carries a filled ≤10 mark with a shield. A figure that simply does not exist carries an unfilled, dashed mark with a dash in it, and names its reason on hover and to a screen reader. Labeling an empty period as a privacy suppression would be telling you something the data does not say, and would hide the more useful fact, which is that no referrals were opened.

Withheld for privacy is not the same as restricted

A third mark, a key, appears where something is published but held to a narrower audience — the record-by-record data access log, which is available to district staff rather than on this public page. That is a decision about who the reader is, and an authorized person signing in does see it.

A privacy suppression is not like that. A figure withheld under the minimum group size is withheld from everyone, including the District’s own staff and this dashboard itself: the value never leaves the data platform, so there is nobody who can sign in and see it. The two marks are deliberately different shapes for that reason.

This is a demonstration with synthetic data

This site is a working demonstration built by Edgent LLC for Rochester City School District RFP-MC-062626. Every figure on the dashboard is synthetic demonstration data. The school names, partner names, student counts, and rates are generated to illustrate how the finished system would look and behave. No real student records, staff records, or district systems are represented anywhere on this site. The privacy protections described above are the same ones the production system would apply to real data.

How often the data updates

The demonstration data platform refreshes its published totals through the day. This page checks for new totals about once a minute and updates on its own, so you do not need to reload it. Each panel shows when it was last updated. In a production deployment the update schedule would follow the district data agreement and the source systems that feed it.

Accessibility

This dashboard is built to be usable with a keyboard and a screen reader. Every chart has a text alternative, color is never the only way information is shown, and the layout follows Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA practices.

Questions about the data

If you have a question about what a number means, about the privacy practices described here, or about the demonstration itself, please contact the Edgent demonstration team at eric.diana@edgentllc.com. In a production deployment this page would also list the district office responsible for the data.