Colorado's recently awarded $17.4 million Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems Grant includes plans to link federally and state-funded early childhood intervention, care and education programs managed by the Colorado Department of Human Services to the state's education data system, including the matching of child identifiers used in various early childhood databases to the student identifier used in the K–12 data system. For more information, see http://nces.ed.gov/Programs/SLDS/pdf/Colorado2009-ARRA.pdf
In 2008, Colorado legislation mandated the development of an interdepartmental data protocol for the collection, storage, sharing and release of data. The protocol will include directives on the circumstances that allow the sharing and release of data and compliance with all state and federal privacy laws. The legislation can be found at http:/./www.leg.state.co.us/CLICS/CLICS2008A/csl.nsf/fsbillcont3/12CF992B0A83DE6D872573CD0057FEE5?Open &file=1364_enr.pdf. The first report of the Interdepartmental Data Protocol Council can be downloaded by clicking here.