Where it started

FLCODE grew out of a practical problem at the North East Florida Educational Consortium (NEFEC). In 2014, NEFEC's Educational Technology Services group, then known as the Data Center, went through a restructuring facilitated by an outside consulting firm. When the consultant interviewed the team about its work, one job stood out. Every member district's TERMS state reporting files were being loaded into SQL tables on a shared server, and a single staff member spent his time running nightly ETL jobs by hand for fifteen districts, chasing down load errors, and writing the queries districts needed to see their own data. The team told the consultant plainly that it needed a data warehouse.

That conversation led to an introduction to the Ed-Fi Alliance and the Ed-Fi Data Standard, which at the time was being promoted as a national standard with grant support available for early adopters. NEFEC staff sat through the first explanation of an operational data store without fully understanding how it differed from a warehouse, but the idea of one standard that could bring TERMS data, Skyward, local assessments, and the state assessment files into a single place was exactly what the districts had been asking for. The team took the proposal to the NEFEC board, was sent back with questions, gathered more input from instructional and district leadership, and returned with a plan the board approved. NEFEC staff attended their first Ed-Fi Summit in 2014.

Why a nonprofit

The decision to organize the work as an independent nonprofit rather than a NEFEC project was deliberate. NEFEC leadership wanted the effort to be a State of Florida initiative, not a small rural district product, and worried that a consortium built around small districts would struggle to understand what a mid size or large district needed. A standalone nonprofit with its own governance would give larger districts a voice and a vote, would let consortia and individual districts participate on equal footing, and would open the door to philanthropic grant funding, including from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, that a regional consortium could not pursue on its own. FLCODE was formed on that basis, with NEFEC and its member districts as the founding participants and Pasco County, then in the middle of a move to the Focus student information system, joining as an early partner.

Proving the standard worked

The earliest implementations ran on Ed-Fi version 1.2, which was entirely XML based, and FLCODE staff presented the XML load process at FAEDS so other Florida districts could see how it was done. When the Ed-Fi Alliance released its API, Skyward adopted it, and moving data from Skyward into the ODS became reliable and routine. The first analytics dashboards that shipped with Ed-Fi turned out not to fit what Florida districts needed and were hard to adapt, and FLCODE watched the Alliance shift its focus toward the standard itself while a market of managed service providers and implementation partners grew up around it. That shift is the reason the ecosystem FLCODE relies on today exists.

The next question was what to do for districts that did not run Skyward. Focus was the other large SIS vendor in the state, so FLCODE began working with Focus districts. At a FLCODE Summit held alongside FETC in Orlando, the head of Focus attended and, by his own account, changed his view of interoperability. He had assumed Ed-Fi was only about pulling his data out. Once he saw that the ODS also let his product pull in staff, finance, and assessment data from systems his company did not own, he understood what the standard could do for an SIS vendor. FLCODE followed up by walking Focus through how to read staff data out of the ODS.

FLCODE also demonstrated that an SIS could consume data, not just supply it. NEFEC invested in a custom script that pulled staff records out of the district business system into the ODS. Skyward then built its student side to read staff identifiers from the ODS, which meant the staff ID a district reported on the student side finally matched the one on the business side. Baker County reported that this eliminated a recurring state reporting rejection tied to mismatched staff IDs, a problem that was especially common with charter school staff, and saved its MIS staff hours of cleanup. NEFEC shared that script with FLCODE, and FLCODE has since made it available to members outside NEFEC. It is running in production today in Sumter and Leon.

Throughout this period the Ed-Fi standard handled the Florida Education Identifier without difficulty. FLCODE's member districts have effectively spent a decade proving that a common standard can carry consistent student and staff identity across systems from different vendors, which is the same problem the Department is now working to solve at the state level.

Who has participated

NEFEC's fifteen member districts plus Madison County were the foundation. Over the years the collaborative has also supported Alachua, DeSoto for a couple of years, Seminole, Osceola, Volusia, Leon, and Sumter, and at one point or another roughly twenty Florida districts have done some form of Ed-Fi work. FLCODE and NEFEC have also met with Orange County, Palm Beach, Escambia and the PACE consortium, the Heartland consortium, St. Johns, and Duval. Many of those conversations ended the same way: the district was interested but chose to wait and see what the state would do about reporting and interoperability before investing.

Sharing the work across Florida and beyond

Beginning in 2016, FLCODE hosted an annual FLCODE Summit to demonstrate what was being built and share it statewide. The summits drew instructional staff, technical staff, district CIOs, and vendors, with breakout sessions for each audience. General sessions over the years included the Skyward state reporting team and the Michigan Data Hub, which presented how Michigan had used the same standard for statewide interoperability. FLCODE also ran hands on trainings for members, including Power BI and data import sessions built on Ed-Fi tooling.

FLCODE has presented at FAMIS and FAEDS every year since 2017, with the possible exception of 2020, and has presented at the Ed-Fi Summit. FLCODE also presented its work at AESA, the national association of educational service agencies, where the Florida story helped introduce other state collaboratives to Ed-Fi.

Leadership and the transition out of NEFEC

FLCODE was originally housed at NEFEC and its bylaws required the president to come from NEFEC. Its first two presidents were the NEFEC staff who brought Ed-Fi to Florida, followed by a third NEFEC leader. When those individuals retired, moved to other positions, or left to start a company, the board amended the bylaws so the collaborative could continue under district leadership. Since then the presidency has been held by Leon County, Flagler County, and Volusia County, which has given FLCODE a leadership base spanning small, mid size, and large districts and a broader view of what the state's districts need.

FLCODE has never had staff of its own, and from the beginning it has depended on partners to do the work. In the early years NEFEC filled that role, acting in effect as the collaborative's first managed service provider. After the transition, FLCODE established preferred partnerships with two Ed-Fi badged vendors, EdGraph for the product and hosted platform and Keen Logic for implementation, services, and support, and those remain its preferred partners today.

Why this matters for the Florida Department of Education

The work described here was done by Florida districts, funded in part by grants already invested in the Ed-Fi standard in this state, and sustained for more than ten years without a state mandate. The collaborative has a governance structure that gives districts of every size a voice, a track record of getting two of the state's largest SIS vendors to exchange data through a common standard, and production experience with the identity matching problem at the center of this RFI. FLCODE offers that history and that structure as a resource to the Department as it considers how a statewide solution should be built.

Florida districts continuing the work

As the collaborative continues to work together sharing resources, expertise and new ideas; district datalakes have been populated and a dashboard repository of reports has been developed.  With the help of grant funding to FLCODE thru the Michael and Susan Dell foundation and resulting subgrants to fund these projects; district visions for practical use cases led to the completion of the dashboards. During the 2025-2026 and 2026-2027 year the following projects resulted as a result of this collaboration:

·        Discipline Incident and Action Summary

·        HR and Student Warning

·        FLDOE OFile Data Summary

·        Student Assessments

·        Enrollment and Attendance Tracking

·        Student Program Enrollment

·        Import Tools for ACT, iReady, Performance Matters data

Moving forward the FLCODE member districts will continue to collaborate and combine resources to continue momentum on projects and to increase their return on investment; operating at a fraction of the cost compared to working on their own.