The heart of the process is the seed records containing the
information on individuals exiting education and workforce training
programs: the customers of these services. Seed record
information comes from a number of sources, including:
public secondary schools, TWC workforce programs such as Choices,
Employment Services, Food Stamp Employment and Training, and other
publicly-funded programs such as Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board,
Windham ISD and Texas Schools for the Deaf,
Blind and Visually Impaired.
These seed records of education and workforce training customers are
then linked to databases that will identify where they are
after exiting their respective programs, regardless if they
actually completed the program or not. These "achievement"
databases include the unemployment insurance (UI) wage
records from the Texas Workforce Commission, identifying
those exiters who found employment; federal employment records,
identifying those individuals working in the federal government or
serving in the military; incarceration records from the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), showing how
many exiters are serving prison sentences;
Texas Bureau of Vital Statistics,identifying those exiters who are
now deceased, and Wage Record Interchange System wage records
identifying WIA and Wagner-Peyser participants that have found
employment outside Texas.
LMCI is continuously trying to incorporate additional
databases into the follow-up system to increase the
probability of locating where an exiter of an education or workforce
training program is. Currently, most of the databases cover
those exiters who remained in Texas. Those working outside
of Texas are not included in the linking process.
Once the follow-up information is added to the exiters'
records, the aggregated results are returned to organizations supplying
the seed records so they can identify the achievements of
individuals exiting their various programs, providing useful
information for program development and planning.