Mandates and reporting
What we could help you evidence, and what we could not.
Written for whoever has to produce the artifact and put their name on it.
What is true today, before anything else
There are no student accounts in this product. The questions, the scoring and the occupation matching all happen in the browser and none of it is sent anywhere. One thing does leave: if a student presses the button asking to see local openings, we receive that occupation's job title and the two-letter state, and nothing else. That is the correct default and is also a hard limit: nothing here can currently evidence a per-student requirement, because there is no per-student record to evidence it with.
If your district needs an artifact this school year, we are not the answer, and the rest of this page is about what a saved version would and would not be able to do. We would rather you knew that on the first page than in week three of an evaluation.
Perkins V, and the one sentence that matters
Eligibility for any Perkins money is conditioned on a Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment, updated at least every two years, under §134(c) of Public Law 115-224. The assessment must evaluate whether programs are aligned to in-demand industry sectors identified by the State or local workforce development board.
The federal reporting instrument then requires the state to elect at least one program quality indicator, and the choice is the commercial opening:
- 5S1 — credential attained
- A recognized postsecondary credential earned by a CTE concentrator.
- 5S2 — postsecondary credits attained
- Dual or concurrent enrollment, or credit transfer.
- 5S3 — participated in work-based learning
- The one most states elected, and the one districts most often cannot evidence per student.
- 3S1 — post-program placement
- Where a concentrator is in the second quarter after exiting: postsecondary, military, national service, or employed. The hardest indicator in the set, because it is about a person after they stopped being your student.
Where we could genuinely help, if a saved version existed: the in-demand alignment evidence in the needs assessment. We can already show, with real counted postings rather than a projection, which fields are hiring in your state and which of them expect no employment history. That is a defensible input to §134(c)(2)(B) and it is the part of the assessment districts most often assert without data.
Where we could not, and will not pretend: 3S1 requires knowing what happened to a person after they left you. No career platform holds that. It comes from a state longitudinal data system or a National Student Clearinghouse match, and any vendor implying otherwise is describing an integration, not a capability.
State plan mandates: the five we actually verified
Roughly forty states are commonly said to mandate an individual career and academic plan. Our research pass verified five against primary statutory or regulatory text and could not reach the rest within its budget. Rather than assert the rest, here are the five with their citations.
A mandate is not the same as an opening, and in this market it is often the opposite. Where a state is required to procure ONE platform on a continuing appropriation, the mandate closes the state for the length of that contract and makes any district purchase a request for local money to duplicate something already provided free. Washington and Wisconsin are both in that position today. We would rather say so on this page than discover it in your budget meeting.
Washington
High School and Beyond Plan
Every student must have a plan. A career interest and skills inventory must be administered by grade seven, the plan begun no later than grade eight, and updated annually with staff support. For a student with an IEP it must align with their school-to-postschool transition plan.
South Carolina
Individual Graduation Plan
The plan must align career goals with the course of study, include experience-based career learning such as internships or apprenticeships, and be approved by a certified school guidance counselor AND the student's parent or guardian. The signature makes it an approval record, not a document.
Wisconsin
Academic and Career Plan
Every school board must provide academic and career planning services to pupils in grades 6 to 12. The chapter carries a note that it was repealed and recreated in 2015, which is a replacement rather than a removal; it is in force. The statute also requires the state to procure and maintain a single statewide platform on a continuing appropriation, and the state has said its funding covers only that one platform. A Wisconsin district already receives a platform centrally, so anything bought locally is paid for twice. We list that here because it is the fact a Wisconsin reader needs, and leaving it out would let this page read as an opportunity where there is not one.
Nevada
Academic plans, by school level
Development of an academic plan is required in middle school and again for ninth-grade pupils, with a separate statutory requirement for annual review and for revision where a pupil requires remediation.
Colorado
Individual Career and Academic Plan
The state board rule was approved at the November 2024 State Board of Education meeting, so any citation predating that is stale. The Department states the standard as “Every student. Every year. A meaningful plan.”
Every link above was re-fetched and checked on 31 August 2026, and each cited section was confirmed to be in force rather than merely to return a page. That check is worth doing again before anyone quotes this list in a bid, and it is the reason the list is dated.
Why this list is short on purpose. In the same research pass we found a Virginia regulation now reading “(Repealed.)”, Louisiana’s FAFSA graduation requirement repealed, an Illinois section renumbered, and Colorado’s ICAP rule re-adopted in November 2024. The citation base in this field decays quickly. A vendor quoting a repealed rule in an RFP response loses the room, and deserves to.
If your state is not on this list, we have not checked it, and we will check it against primary text before we claim anything about it.
The procurement checklist, and where we stand on it
The items below disqualify a bid more often than any feature wins one. This is our honest position on each.
- Signed data privacy agreement
- We will sign the SDPC National Data Privacy Agreement, your state alliance’s version, or your own. None is on file today because there is no district today. What we can hand you now is the thing that agreement is built around: the field-level data inventory below.
- Rostering and single sign-on
- Not built. And worth knowing before you plan around it: Clever’s free teacher-led route is retired, its paid tier carries a fifty-school minimum, and its rostering data does not reliably carry a date of birth or grade, so an age gate built on it is unreliable by construction.
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA, VPAT)
- Build gates reject the specific accessibility failures that recur, on every deploy. An automated accessibility engine is run against the live site by hand at phone, tablet, Chromebook and desktop widths before a release — it is not wired into the build, and "every deploy is checked" would have overstated it. Automated testing is also not screen-reader testing: keyboard operation and announcements are driven manually, and no JAWS or NVDA testing has been done. No completed VPAT yet, and we will not send you one we have not earned. The dated measurement, its method and everything it cannot see are on the accessibility page.
- Field-level data inventory (the NDPA Exhibit B question)
- This is the exhibit that normally takes a technology director weeks to argue through: every student data element a vendor collects, marked required or optional, feature by feature. Ours is almost empty, and the “almost” is the part worth reading. No name, no email, no student identifier, no date of birth, no grade, no school, no cookie, and no assessment response — the answers to the sixty questions never leave the browser at all.
What our server does receive: when, and only when, a student presses the button asking to see local openings, it receives an occupation title that was selected from a list ordered by that student’s answers, plus a two-letter state, plus the IP address and ordinary request metadata that our host and our database record in their own access logs. It never receives who asked, and it never receives an answer. But a title derived from a result is not nothing: press several buttons in one sitting and the sequence narrows what that person’s profile looked like, and it lands beside an IP address whose retention we have not audited. The interest instrument, its scoring and the match against every occupation all run inside the browser tab and nothing is transmitted, which you can confirm in your own network tab in about thirty seconds rather than taking our word for it. The exploration record is a file the student exports and keeps; we never receive it.
We have not audited or configured our host’s or our database’s log retention, so we make no claim about it; assume it is whatever a normal CDN and a normal database keep. We are working on getting that in writing, and it will be named here when we have it. And this describes the product as it stands today. Anything that stores a student — a roster, a teacher’s progress view, the saved record a district will ask for in week two — makes this exhibit non-empty, and that is a decision to take deliberately rather than to arrive at. - Security review (SOC 2, StateRAMP, TX-RAMP)
- None held. We will answer a questionnaire in full detail and we can be audited.
- Evidence of effectiveness
- None. No outcome study, no placement rate, no impact claim. We have not been in a school long enough to have earned one.
What would actually be useful to us
If you run one of these programs, the single most useful thing you could send is the requirement you personally have to satisfy, in your own words, with the report you have to produce attached.
We would rather build to a real artifact from one district than to a feature list assembled from ten vendors’ marketing pages. How to reach us.