SameGoal's student/parent demographics integration with Ascender uses the Ascender Special Ed/Student Export. Most districts new to SameGoal that currently use Ascender may already have this export running for their prior special programs software; this process simply needs to be "switched over" to SameGoal.
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If your ESC hosts Ascender, you will need to contact them for help completing the steps below.
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In the event a single SSA uses SameGoal with multiple districts, the following steps must be completed
once for each district. Each district using SameGoal has its own separate SameGoal instance and corresponding SFTP account.
Steps
To setup demographics integration with Ascender:- Generate a keypair
- Sync your public key
- Verify you can connect
- Setup a nightly Ascender export
- Verify successful setup
SameGoal SFTP accounts use public key authentication (rather than a password) to ensure secure access. Generate a public/private keypair using these instructions.
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Usually its easiest if the organization hosting Ascender (typically the ESC) generates this keypair, as it will be used by the process sending files to SameGoal.
Generating a keypair creates:
- One private key (do not share; store on the machine that will connect)
- One public key (can be freely shared with anyone). SameGoal's public key, for reference, is found here.
If you have login access to SameGoal for the district, you can add and sync the public key through the SameGoal web interface using these instructions.
If you do not have SameGoal web access for the district (common for ESC staff), you can email the public key as an attachment to tier2help@samegoal.com from your work email account. Include district name, and our technical team will install the key.
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It can take up to 60 mins after a public key is added to sync/allow you to connect.
Use an SFTP tool to verify you can connect to the district's SFTP account using these instructions. Connect information:
- Host: sftp.samegoal.com
- Username: district domain (typically email address domain, eg "fooisd.org")
- Authentication: Public key only
We recommend you setup a nightly process to extract and upload Ascender information using the following steps:
- Export information from Ascender in the Special Ed/Student Export format.
- Include all students at the district (not only ones identified as Special Ed, 504 etc) so that students are already in SameGoal when a new referral comes in.
- Include all students in this export, even after an enrollment change (eg withdrawal). This allows SameGoal to update the student's (eg now inactive) enrollment status in SameGoal.
- Connect to the district's SameGoal SFTP account.
- Create a new epoch directory in /upload/ whose name is of the date-time format YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.
- Upload the generated file (typically of format "TxEISStudent_XXXXX.txt") directly into the epoch directory.
- Upload an empty file named COMPLETE (case sensitive) into the epoch directory to indicate the upload is final and can be processed. Said differently, this should result in files of the following format nightly:
- /upload/20220101-139029/TxEISStudent_XXXXXX.txt
- /upload/20220101-139029/COMPLETE
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If creating an epoch directory and uploading a COMPLETE file is difficult for some reason, you may instead:
- Connect to the district's SameGoal SFTP account.
- Upload the generated file (eg "TxEISStudent_XXXXX.txt") directly into /upload/, overwriting the file each run.
- SameGoal's integration server will automatically detect the TxEISStudent_XXXXX.txt file, and copy it into an epoch directory with a COMPLETE file to initiate processing. This has a narrow potential for racey behavior, if your process has not finished writing at the time SameGoal detects the file and begins the copy, but usually works just fine.
SameGoal's integration server will automatically recognize and process epochs in the format described in the last step. Once an epoch has been processed it is moved from /upload/ to /upload-processed/.
A successful setup will result in files of the following format:
- /upload/20220101-139029/TxEISStudent_XXXXXX.txt
- /upload/20220101-139029/COMPLETE
- /upload/20220101-139029/students.csv (data remapped into SameGoal format)
- /upload/20220101-139029/guardians.csv (data remapped into SameGoal format)
If there is an issue, an error file will be included in the epoch and students.csv and guardians.csv may not be generated. For help troubleshooting, please email tier2help@samegoal.com.