Collecting & Recording Data for the Indicators

What to Collect, continued

What types of data do we need to collect on the topic areas and activities?

For some questions, you will need to answer with qualitative data, such as short narrative answers.
Other questions call for answers with quantitative data, such as total numbers.

There are two types of quantitative, or numbers, data that you need to collect: those that call for numbers "reached," and those that call for cumulative data. Let's take a closer look at these types of questions.

Reach: Some Indicators questions ask you to count schools, school districts, external agency partners, or regional support units that you have "reached."

• Schools refers to public schools including magnet, charter, alternative, vocational, and any school that your education agency funds.
• School districts may also be known as parishes, School Administrative Units (SAU), independent school districts, and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES): count ONLY district-level staff for these questions.
• External agency partners refers to agencies, organizations, and groups outside your own agency with which you collaborate or associate to further the goals of your project.
• Regional support units are state-recognized agencies or organizations that provide professional development, technical assistance, and educational materials to school districts and schools within the state.

When a question on the Indicators contains the word "reach," it requires a particular type of data collection. Rather than counting each instance where you carried out a particular activity within a topic (i.e., HIV policy distribution or HIV individualized technical assistance), you only count each school, district, external agency partner, or regional support unit once for that topic and activity.

Once they are contacted (or touched) once, they are not counted again for the "reach" questions for that particular topic and activity for the remainder of the budget period.

For example: If you distributed two different HIV education policy documents on two different occasions to five district-level staff from the same district each time, you can say you have reached one district that year for HIV policy distribution for HIV education.
Cumulative data: This refers to a count of the total number of events you held or the total number of participants that attended your event (i.e., the total number of participants that attended a professional development event).

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