South Dakota SLDS + CEDS
A statewide Master Data Management strategy—built and operated with the South Dakota Dept. of Education since 2012.
South Dakota’s educators, families, legislators, and researchers turn to a single platform to understand how the state’s schools are performing, where their investments are producing strong results, and where additional support may be needed. OtisEd has been the team behind that platform since 2012—designing, building, and operating the longitudinal data system that powers the state’s accountability efforts, the educator portal where district and school staff do their day-to-day work, and the public-facing report card families and policymakers use to ask questions of the data.
What We Deliver
South Dakota’s system integrates data from more than ten systems, including assessments, the statewide student information system, the personnel credentialing system, GED completion files, college data (ACT, Accuplacer, National Student Clearinghouse), the Civil Rights Data Collection, and school and district finance reporting. The warehouse itself is modeled and managed in Synergyz, OtisEd’s data-modeling platform, which today holds CEDS-aligned data warehouse versions for both K–12 and higher education environments.
Figure 1. The SD-STARS data pipeline.
What we’ve built with SDDOE
The platform
South Dakota’s system integrates data from more than ten systems, including assessments, the statewide student information system, the personnel credentialing system, GED completion files, college data (ACT, Accuplacer, National Student Clearinghouse), the Civil Rights Data Collection, and school and district finance reporting. The warehouse itself is modeled and managed in Synergyz, OtisEd’s data-modeling platform, which today holds CEDS-aligned data warehouse versions for both K–12 and higher education environments.
The educator portal
SD-STARS (the Student Teacher Accountability and Reporting System) is the workspace where SDDOE, district leaders, and school staff run the state’s accountability system, including training centers, collaboration communities, content libraries, report card workflows, credit tracking, and stakeholder engagement.
The report card
School Finder (sdschools.sd.gov) is the public-facing site that families, legislators, and researchers use to understand how schools across the state are performing. It publishes more than 2,000 data points annually, anchored by the multi-indicator School Performance Index, with full subgroup disaggregation across federally required student groups.
The data strategy
In partnership with SDDOE, OtisEd provides a data strategy solution built on five pillars: data governance and systems integration, centralized architecture, stakeholder engagement, unified standards, and a comprehensive policy framework.
The governance layer is where OtisEd’s human-driven, AI-supported approach is most visible. AIME (AI Metadata Enricher), an OtisEd-built system, uses AI to draft plain-language descriptions of every cataloged data asset; each description passes through a validation engine and lands in a data steward’s queue for approval. The Common Education Data Standards ground this work, reducing ambiguity in definitions, streamlining state and federal reporting, and making the platform interoperable with national research initiatives and partner agencies.
Figure 2. The governance framework that powers SD-STARS.
Why It Matters
What began as an SLDS implementation has matured into a statewide data management strategy—powering both K–12 accountability and a P20 expansion that already includes the South Dakota Board of Regents, with the Board of Technical Education and other partner agencies on the roadmap. The platform is built on a foundation of governed data, CEDS-aligned standards, AI-supported metadata, and a long-running partnership with SDDOE and the SD Data Collaborative. All partners are anchored in the belief that evidence-informed policy and practice are critical to helping our students, families, educators, and communities flourish.
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