Awards and Achievements
Many Accomplishments of Jeff Sumner!
"Jeff Sumner has been a busy man. In mid-May, he conducted two presentations at AIRS conference in Houston: an overview of the disaster knowledge base his project built for HHSC's 2-1-1 network, and a discussion regarding difficulties in using AIRS XML standards. Both presentations went well. In addition, the new 3.0 version of the AIRS XML standard was released following the conference. The new version of the national standard - which contained many of the suggestions Jeff had made in the months prior - significantly improves the standard's accessibility and usability, therefore making it easier for users of divergent applications to share information. This is a critical feature for Information and Referral centers across the country. Somehow, during all of this, Jeff found the time to pass his certification test for his PMP!!! "
Congratulations to Jeff for all of these great accomplishments.
TEA PEIMS Mainframe Migration SUCCESS!!
"We are happy to announce that the Cooper TEA team responsible for the PEIMS Mainframe Migration Sub-project successfully achieved their goal for the Fall/Mid Year data publishing deadline. This project team is tasked with re-writing the PEIMS mainframe processes in IBM Data Stage on AIX. They are currently a year ahead of schedule and have been able to develop and parallel test concurrently with the Mainframe processing and publishing schedule. It was a really big push to complete this work in time for the Fall/Mid Year publishing due date of March 3, 2009 since this collection comprises the most complex logic, and the team really came together to get it done! Congratulations to Kathleen Browning, John Reese, Suman Budde, Geoff McElhanon and Chandana Chelamkuri. Special thanks to Silvia Brunet-Jones who fearlessly lead the team and insistently drove the effort to come in by the due date (against all odds)!"
Kudos to our Cooper TEA team !
Best of Texas: Ed Comer's Fingerprint Project
"Ed Comer helped work on the Texas Education Agency (TEA) project for Educator and School-Worker Fingerprinting and Background Checking that was awarded the Best of Texas 2008 award for Best Collaborative Project Across Multiple Jurisdictions by the Center for Digital Government. During the 2007 legislative session, Senate Bill 9 (SB9) was passed to authorize and require background checks for those who have access to students in a public school setting and to ensure that individuals who have certain kinds of serious criminal history be removed from a public school setting. The TEA system facilitates the fingerprinting and criminal background check of certified classroom teachers, administrators, counselors, educational diagnosticians, and aides, as well as non-certified employees, charter school teachers, and substitutes. The system is used by over 1200 Texas school districts, education service centers and charter schools representing over 10,000 schools. Approximately 30 TEA investigations and fingerprint specialists use the system every day to safeguard the State's 4.6 million students. Over the next four years the system is expected to manage the fingerprinting and background checks of more than 1 million teachers and other employees. The implementation of SB 9 required cooperation between the Texas Legislature, the Commissioner of Education, the State Board of Educator Certification (SBEC), Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, TEA Information Systems, TEA Investigations, TEA Legal, TEA Accounting, DPS, FBI, L1 Identity Solutions, Independent School Districts, Regional Service Centers, and Charter Schools. To meet the hard production rollout deadline of January 1, 2008, set by the Legislature, the system requirements were defined even as the legal interpretations, policies, and procedures supporting SB 9 were still being ironed out. The criticality of the SB 9 requirement combined with the large number of organizations involved meant that every little detail required significant planning, discussion, coordination, and multiple approvals. The system development was forced to proceed in parallel to the massive amount of coordination that was required. Wherever possible, the design looked to predict, adapt and accommodate a late binding of details. Indeed, many details were not known when development started. Many other details changed throughout the course of the development, the last change coming just one week before deployment. Despite the high level of coordination required and resulting fluidity of requirements details, the system was deployed on-time and in-budget."
We are very proud of the work that Ed Comer and
his team put into implementing this new project. !
