Champions and Stewards

TSDS Champions and Stewards

Latest News

Webinars, Presentations, User Guides Posted

The latest Field Coordination Network presentations, webinars, and TSDS user guides are now posted on the new For ESC Staff resources page.

What Are TSDS Champions and Stewards?

The LEA Stewards and ESC Champions provide critical support and training for the rollout and ongoing use of TSDS.

TSDS represents a radical departure in data collection for TEA because it provides data directly to authorized educators in near-real time. However, the size of the user base for this initiative requires a new, formal approach to training and support:

Each ESC has trained and certified "Champions" in key subjects areas of TSDS: PEIMS, Unique ID, TEAL, and Technical. These champions are responsible for training and supporting the TSDS specialists ("Stewards") at the LEAs, and for disseminating news and updates from TEA to the LEAs.
Collectively, all ESC Champions make up the Field Coordination Network, with whom TEA communicates regularly to report on TSDS development and implementation progress, to advise the ESCs of important news or changes, and to introduce new components of TSDS as they become available.
ESCs now have a formalized role in the TSDS support structure. All issues, bugs, and suggestions go through the TSDS Incident Management System (TIMS). Certified ESC staff have the role of "Level 2" support, meaning that when LEA Stewards (Level 1) are unable to solve a problem, they escalate it to the ESCs. In turn, ESC staff can escalate an incident to TEA for further evaluation (Level 3) or code fixes (Level 4). See the TSDS Training & Support section for more information on our support model.

In addition to their roles as TSDS Champions, ESCs engage with TSDS in a number of ways:

The Texas Computer Cooperative (TCC) continues to provide its popular SIS, TxEIS™, which creates TEDS-compliant extracts for loading to TSDS.
ESCs are also users of the system: they load their own PEIMS data and accept their LEAs' PEIMS collections via TSDS.

LEA Stewards

Role	Responsibilities
Executive Steward	Appointed member (likely Superintendent or designee) that is responsible for leading TSDS deployment for their LEA.
Data Steward (Technical Support)	The TSDS Data Steward will work with the source data vendors to ensure the data is properly loaded into the Operational Data Store (ODS).
PEIMS Coordinator	Designated PEIMS Coordinators within LEAs across the state of Texas.
Unique ID Steward	Recommended position for all LEAs to help launch TSDS Unique ID within their LEA.
Program Steward	Recommended position for large LEAs or LEAs that plan to implement multiple TSDS components at the same time to help manage the complexity of training and deployment within their LEA.

ESC Champions

Role	Responsibilities
Executive Champion	Appointed member (likely ESC Executive Director) that is responsible for leading TSDS deployment within their region.
Technical Champion	Appointed member that is responsible for training and supporting LEA Data Stewards on how to work with their source data vendors to ensure their data is properly loaded into the Operational Data Store (ODS).
PEIMS Champion	Appointed member (likely PEIMS Coordinator) that is responsible for training and supporting the LEA PEIMS Coordinators as they transition to the new TSDS PEIMS process.
Unique ID Champion	Appointed member responsible for training and supporting LEA Unique ID Stewards in the use of TSDS Unique ID.
TEAL Champion	Appointed member responsible for supporting LEA and ESC staff with TEAL access requests and related access issues.