​SAN JOSE, CA – The Santa Clara County Office of Education (SCCOE) received a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, on behalf of the Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust.

The grant supports the Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust with constructing and utilizing a secure tool to help combine data from public schools and health and human service agencies in partnership with university researchers. This tool, DataZone, will be used to help develop actionable solutions to critical educational and social problems that confront the region's children and families. This grant period is from March 1, 2017 through February 28, 2020.

"Shared data systems will help us address the root causes of the achievement gap -- not just the symptoms," Chan said. "We need new tools that connect the knowledge of all the adults responsible for a child's development and education -- that includes parents, teachers, health care providers, therapists and other specialists."

Dr. Chan made the announcement yesterday at the "Data Driven Solutions for Silicon Valley: A Conversation with Distinguished Leaders Luncheon."

"We are extremely grateful to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for its generous support," Jon R. Gundry, County Superintendent of Schools, said. "From the County Office perspective, we see our role as providing the framework for making all this happen. The project goes beyond the student academic information to integrate data systems with county agencies and social services that these kids and families might need beyond what is in the school."

Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) has trained staff in the use of DataZone and has been pleased with the results. "It's become more and more important to gather all types of data so we can get a good picture of how our students are doing," said Dr. Stanley Rose, SCUSD Superintendent. "Traditionally, we've been storing those different areas of data in different silos. What we're trying to do now is allow our data to go into one area that can be used interchangeably to look at data's use in a number of different ways."

The Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust through this new secure database, DataZone, enables teams of education and health and human service practitioners, representatives of community-based organizations and university data scientists to address many critical issues facing students and families in the region through the effective and timely use of data. Currently, 256 local agencies are involved in the project with 27 districts participating, representing 267,000 students.