Staff Domain - Overview

Key Entities

This domain contains:

• The Credential entity which captures staff credentials.
• The OpenStaffPosition entity, which indicates the employment postings for an education organization and captures the result of that posting.
• The Person entity which represents a single individual who is linked to one or more staff records.
• The School entity represents an educational organization that includes staff, students and candidates who participate in classes and educational activity groups, inclusive of school in a post secondary institution.
• The Staff entity, which models individuals like teachers, principals, administrators, counselors who provide instructional or support services to students.
• The StaffDemographic entity represents the demographic information associated to a staff member.
• The StaffDirectory entity represents the contact information associated to a staff member.
• The StaffEducationOrganizationEmploymentAssociation, which represents employment information.
• The StaffEducationOrganizationAssignmentAssociation, which represents position assignments and roles.
• The StaffIdentificationCode entity holds the different identity codes for a staff member.
• The StaffLeave entity which tracks staff leave history and StaffAbsenceEvent which tracks staff attendance.
• The StaffSchoolAssociation, which captures additional information and associations relating to instructional duties.

Key Concepts

The key concepts include the following:

• In prior versions, demographic and identification code data were maintained within the Staff entity, while contact information was stored in the StaffEducationOrganizationContactAssociation. In DS 6.0, the Staff entity was simplified by moving demographic and identification code data into dedicated entities, improving flexibility and reducing the complexity of maintaining Staff records. As part of this redesign, three new entities were introduced in DS 6.0:

  • StaffDemographic entity which is used to capture demographic information related to a Staff member at a particular educational organization. Information includes data such as Citizenship, Race, Sex, Language etc.

  • StaffDirectory entity which is used to capture contact information to be used for a staff member at a particular educational organization.

  • StaffIdentificationCode entity which is used to capture identification code related to a Staff member at a particular educational organization.

• There are two distinct associations between a Staff member and an EducationOrganization. Note that there is also a StaffSectionAssociation relationship; that relationship is detailed in the Teaching and Learning Domain.

  • The StaffEducationOrganizationEmploymentAssociation entity is primarily for the financial relationship with the entity that is responsible for paying the staff member. This relationship also models volunteer staff or contract employees of an educational organization with which the staff member signed a volunteer or contract agreement.

  • The StaffEducationOrganizationAssignmentAssociation entity provides information on the education organization where a staff member provides services (i.e., the staff member's school of service).

• Prior to DS 6.0, there were three associations between Staff and EducationOrganization. This is a breaking change introduced in DS 6.0, resulting from the removal of StaffEducationOrganizationContactAssociation and the consolidation of its functionality into the StaffDirectory entity.

• Some additional information related to the assignment association is captured in the StaffSchoolAssociation, but this pertains more to specific duties at the school rather than a description of the actual relationship.

• If an assignment is directly tied to employment (i.e., the staff member's pay would differ based upon the assignments), then an association is used from the StaffEducationOrganizationAssignmentAssociation entity to the StaffEducationOrganizationEmploymentAssociation entity.