Direct Certification

Introduction

Direct Certification is the process under which local education agencies certify children who are members of households receiving assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as Food Stamps), as eligible for free school meals, without further application, based on information provided by the State Agency administering SNAP.

The report can be extracted in one of two formats: Tab-delimited text (with header) or Fixed Record Length text (without header).

Important Notes on Student Address Fields

The Direct Certification report includes internal coding to parse the student address fields in order to report each part of the address in a separate field in the file output.
PowerSchool provides separate data entry boxes for Street Address and Apt #, but these values are stored in a single [Students]Street field in the database.
When a value is entered into the Apt # data entry box, PowerSchool automatically inserts a comma between the end of the street address and the apartment number when writing to the database.
Districts should not enter any commas within the student address fields as this may cause issues with the internal parsing routine, and may result in an incorrect file output.

Selection Criteria

Selection criteria determine which database records are used in the report. Refer to selection criteria for analysis when the report does not return the correct records.

Student Selection

The report selects records from the [Students] table based on the following criteria:

The student is not flagged as Exclude from State Reporting.

Report Input

For help with navigation and running the report, see How to Find and Generate a Report.

Field	Description
Schools to Include*	Select Multiple Schools using Ctrl+Click to select multiple schools or Shift+Click to select a range of schools or All Schools
Current Selection Students*	Indicate which students to include in the report by selecting one of the following options: The Selected x Students Only – Run the report for students in the current selection. All Students – Run the report for all students in the current school or district that meet the selection criteria. Note: If running the report for a single student, or group of students, select the students prior to running report.
Exclude Students Designated as FDC	Select Y to report only students who ARE NOT designated as Free Lunch Eligible (FDC)
Text/No Header or Tab Delimited /with Header Output	Select an output format: Tab Delimited/With Header: The report outputs as a tab-delimited text file with a header row that can be edited in Excel. If the district wishes to submit the edited Excel file, the district must follow the procedures provided on the CDE website in order to convert the file to fixed text format before uploading to the Direct Certification system. The output file name is “DirectCert Tab_[Dist or Sch Abbr]_date/timestamp.txt” Text/No Header: The report outputs as a fixed record length text file without a header row. Districts may submit this file directly to the Direct Certification System. The output file name is “DirectCert_Text_[Dist or Sch Abbr]_date/timestamp.txt”

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Report Output

Each of the fields displayed in the output of the report are described below. See Understanding the Report Output Table for a definition of each column in the table.

Item #	Data Element	Description	[Table]FieldName	Start	End	Field Length
1	DISTNUM	The 4-digit district code.	[Prefs]Value where [Prefs]Name = DistrictNumber	1	4	4
2	STUDENT-ID	The locally assigned student number.	[Students]Student_Number	5	14	10
3	STUDENT-SSN	The state assigned student number.	[Students]SSN	15	23	9
4	LAST-NAME	The student’s last name. Note: This is the student's legal name. If the legal name field is not populated, the student's preferred name is reported.	[StudentCoreFields]PSCore_Legal_Last_Name [Students]Last_Name	24	53	30
5	FIRST-NAME	The student’s first name. Note: This is the student's legal name. If the legal name field is not populated, the student's preferred name is reported.	[StudentCoreFields]PSCore_Legal_First_Name [Students]First_Name	54	83	30
6	BIRTH-DATE	The student’s date of birth.	[Students]DOB	84	91	8
7	CASE-NUMBER	SNAP case number. Note: This will be reported as blank.	N/A	92	100	9
8	STREET-NUMBER	The student’s street number.	Parsed from [Students]Street	101	106	6
9	ADDRESS-1	The student’s street name or address.	Parsed from [Students]Street	107	136	30
10	ADDRESS-2	The student’s second address line.	Parsed from [Students]Street	137	166	30
11	APTNUM	The student’s apartment or trailer number.	Parsed from [Students]Street	167	172	6
12	CITY	The student’s city.	[Students]City	173	192	20
13	ZIPCODE	The student’s zip code. Note: Both 5- and 9-digit zip codes are acceptable. If a 9-digit value exists, the dash will be stripped.	[Students]Zip	193	201	9
14	MATCH-TYPE	Type of match made against the Dept of Human Services Master file. Note: This will be reported as blank.	N/A	202	202	1
15	SCHOOL	The 4-letter school code. Note: This will be reported as blank.	N/A	203	210	8

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