ISBE Gifted and Accelerated Data and File

This article is for Illinois schools that are required to submit the ISBE Gifted and Accelerated file only. It describes how to fill the required fields with data and how to generate the file itself.

The required data fields are defined by the ISBE as:

1. Accelerated Placement
• Means the practice of assigning a student to a specific content area at a higher instructional level than is typical given the student's grade for the purpose of providing access to appropriately challenging learning opportunities in one or more subject areas.
2. Gifted Test
• Gifted Children: “Children who give evidence of high performance capability in areas such as intellectual, creative, artistic, leadership capacity, or specific academic fields, and who require services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop such capabilities”.

The fields are assigned to each student in SchoolInsight. To locate the data for a student you can check the demographics tab in the student single-view page:

Moreover, you can change their values for one student at a time, or you can set the values for many students at once using the student mass edit functionality. You can save time and labour using the mass edit, if you are setting the Gifted and Accelerated fields for the first time.

To set the Gifter and Accelerated fields for a single student:

1. Go to Admin Main > Student Single-View
2. Search for and select the student
3. Edit Student
4. Scroll to the Gifted and Accelerated table
5. Select a value for Accelerated Placement
6. Select a value for Gifted Test
7. Save

To set the Gifted and Accelerated fields for many students at once:

1. Go to Admin Main > Student Multi-View
2. Mass Edit
3. Scroll to the Gifted and Accelerated table
4. Select a value for Accelerated Placement
5. Select a value for Gifted Test
6. Scroll down until you see a list of students
7. Check the checkbox next to any student that should receive the selected values
8. Save

After you populate the data, you can run the ISBE Gifted and Accelerated file. Like any other ISBE file, this is a two step process:

1. Generate the file at the school level to have SchoolInsight check for missing or incorrect data. The system will display warnings and you can fix them there.
2. Generate the file at the district level in order to upload it directly to the ISBE.

To generate the file at the school level:

1. Go to Admin Main > Import/Export > Export ISBE Files
2. Set file type to Gifted and Accelerated
3. (Optional) Set other options
4. Preview
5. SchoolInsight will check the data for completion and other errors and display warning messages that list the missing or incorrect data.
6. You can edit the students with the missing/incorrect data from this page

Some of the most common warning messages are:

• The Accelerated Placement field is required.
• The Gifted Test field is required.

This means that the required data has not been entered for this particular student. If you receive this error for many students, then consider using the mass edit functionality to complete the data first, as described earlier.

To generate the file at the district level:

1. Go to School District Admin Main > Import/Export > ISBE Files > Export ISBE File
2. Set file type to Gifted and Accelerated
3. (Optional) change the school field if you want to run this file for a single school. By default the file will run for all schools in the district at once.
4. (Optional) change other options
5. Preview
6. Make sure the errors have been resolved at the school level
7. Click on Upload Directly to the ISBE and follow the prompt to submit your file