After hearing from the field, the New York State Education Department’s Office of Early Learning is moving away from the traditional BEDS day in October for the counting of Universal Prekindergarten (UPK) students for funding in the 2021-2022 school year. To allow districts to continuously recruit students into their program, UPK enrollment data will now be pulled in March starting in the 2021-2022 school year and each year thereafter. The date for the 2021-2022 school year that will be used to calculate a district’s maximum amount payable will be March 15, 2022.

All prekindergarten students, regardless of the funding that supports their PreK program, must be reported in SIRS. Currently, the Student Information Repository System (SIRS) manual provides two Pre-K program codes – 902 for Universal Pre-K and 990 for “Other” Pre-K for the reporting of UPK, UPK students who placements change to SUFDPK and new SUFDPK enrollment in the 2021-2022 school year. The SIRS manual is updated to reflect the reporting needs for UPK, previous UPK whose placement has been converted to SUFDPK, and new SUFDPK students and is included in the pdf version linked to this memo. Failure to appropriately code prekindergarten students may result in a reduction in the district’s reimbursement amount for the provision of 2021-2022 prekindergarten services.

We will be collecting additional necessary data pertaining to child enrollment counts for SUFDPK through the SED Monitoring and Vendor Performance System (MVPS) on NYSED’s Application Business Portal. Information and guidance regarding this process will be forthcoming in a separate field memo.

Questions regarding any of the state-administered prekindergarten programs or MVPS on the NYSED Application Business Portal may be directed to the Office of Early Learning at oel@nysed.gov.

Questions regarding how to code students should be directed to your local Regional Information Center (RIC) or Level 1 (L1) Center.

Questions your RIC or L1 center are unable to resolve about reporting of data in SIRS can be directed to the Office of Information and Reporting Services. Data Support is designed to provide self-service support for our SIRS data warehouse customers to find information quickly and easily by key word search or categories. If customers are unable to find an answer, you may submit your question (ticket) to our IRS staff (agent) by clicking on the “Help” button on the bottom right of any Datasupport or IRS webpage screen.