Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has modified the Disciplinary Incident Reporting System (DIRS). Modifications were made to comply with Minn. Stat. § 121A.53. This statute identifies added data collection requirements when an incident is identified as a “physical assault of a district employee by a student.”
Two new fields were added – ‘Physical Assault’ which refers to an incident which included a physical assault of a district employee by a student. If your district has had an incident with an assault situation you need to add the person as a victim in the Other Person involved area. In SYNERGY the extract looks for any Discipline Incident where the Violation is Assault (3) and Physical Assault is selected, Arson (2), Bomb (4), Weapon (22) or Homicide (28). The victim in the Other Person involved must be either a Teacher (2) or District Employee (3). This information is found in the Relationship to School table in K12.Discipline. Make sure your table is using the appropriate State Codes. The DIRS extract automatically inserts the new Physical Assault field and sets the Value to True if any of the above codes are used.
The second field inserted is ‘Physical Assault State’ which refers to the question ‘Are you reporting this incident to fulfill your requirement to report assault of a district employee as set forth under Minn. Stat. § 121A.53?’ The extract automatically sets this to True if you have the previous criteria above also set to True.
A new Discipline Disposition Code is also available Code 12 “Other Sanction, Intervention or Resolution in response to the Assault.” This Disposition code is only used for the above scenario – but not required to be used if a different Disposition was appropriate. Please add this code to your District Disposition Code Table in Discipline Incident Setup. If you use code 12, an explanation is required. Explanations are entered on the Additional Text in the Disposition View.
The installation of the patch for these XML changes is scheduled for June 2nd. If you have any questions, please contact any of the Student Support Staff.