help strutil

[sogervais]

Hi. Thanks for pulling this package together.

Typing "help phoneticenc" returns the help for strutil. Typing "help strutil" returns nothing to the help viewer. ADO package installed easily enough and I was able to figure out how to get the information on using the necessary commands. Might be confusing for some otherwise.

Also description for STRUTIL returned by ADO describe starts with "plugins to make it easier to make better looking graphs in Stata." The next paragraph appears to be a better match for the description I think.

I work in the Accountability Office for the San Bernardino City Unified School District. I am cleaning some data files and was excited to see that you had provided a wrapper for these. You can reach me at stephen.gervais@sbcusd.k12.ca.us if you have more questions.

Stephen

[wbuchanan]

Hey Stephen,

Glad it's been helpful. The package name strutil is meant to be a bit more generic in nature since I still have some longer term plans to add additional functionality to the package itself, but your point is valid nonetheless. If you wanted to see any of the more recent things I've been trying to get off the ground with my new team check out our organization account here (@fcps). I've only put together a skeleton for topics but plan to get things like coding and data standards set up to create a bit more uniformity across all our shops that work with data as well as facilitate some more cross-functional collaboration. What systems are you guys using out in San Bernardino?

[wbuchanan]

@rowen0718 & @daphnejenkins,

This might be an easy fix that I could use to show you how documentation in Stata is created. I'm still working on learning a bit more about parser generators to write up some stuff that would make it easier to translate things like this between several different standards but it would be fairly trivial to throw together a strutil.sthlp file that just serves as a table of contents. To get a similar idea you can look at the help file structure in brewtheme help.

[sogervais]

Thanks for sharing your work. I'll be sure to follow along with what you are doing as our offices here have many of the same issues with standards and uniformity to address. SBCUSD is a large urban school district here in Southern California - somewhere in the top 10 in size in the state. We have more than 75 schools including 8 comprehensive and 11 middle schools. Our census enrollment is around 50000 students most of whom qualify for free and reduced meals programs. Lots of issues with English Learners and under-performing minorities who we are trying to get ready for college. Our office operates under our Ed Services division and is responsible for Accountability and Educational Technology. My group (myself and one other) specifically prepares reporting for our school board on any of the state accountability measures (ie., academics, suspensions, attendance and chronic absenteeism) plus support grants and local research. I use a few different tools in my workflow and try to automate things as much as possible. I connect to our SIS database backend and harvest materials for my department research server so that I can answer the questions that come our way. Most of this is via SQL Server though I use Python and Stata for much of my ETL and analysis work. I've become rather passionate about using GIS for Educational Administration in order to understand student data and help develop educational policy. Much of my research in this area uses ArcGIS and I've gone on to earn a MS in Geographic Information Science. Here is some of my work on Chronic Absenteeism http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/educ15/papers/922_244.pdf Other than Stata, what systems do you use? Stephen

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---- William Buchanan <notifications@github.com> wrote:

Hey Stephen, Glad it's been helpful. The package name `strutil` is meant to be a bit more generic in nature since I still have some longer term plans to add additional functionality to the package itself, but your point is valid nonetheless. If you wanted to see any of the more recent things I've been trying to get off the ground with my new team check out our organization account here ***@***.***). I've only put together a skeleton for topics but plan to get things like coding and data standards set up to create a bit more uniformity across all our shops that work with data as well as facilitate some more cross-functional collaboration. What systems are you guys using out in San Bernardino? -- You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #2 (comment)

[wbuchanan]

@sogervais

I'm a bit of a polyglot myself. I have Stata, Mplus, Python, R, Java, JavaScript, SQL, QGIS, and several other languages in use on a relatively regular basis (python is a bit less often). Do you do any student enrollment projections for the purposes of staffing and/or redistricting attendance zones? My office is fairly new so right now the big push is focused on developing more robust data infrastructure and automating/standardizing some processes.

[sogervais]

Projections are not my responsibility though we do some cross-checking of reports on occasion. We have a facilities department that traditionally is responsible for projections. That office works with one of our assistant sups to set and adjust boundary lines and provide numbers that are used by HR to determine staffing levels. Not sure if they still partner with Davis Demographics to confirm impact of boundary line changes though we've worked with them in the past. Having a new office is great - An opportunity to set things up right! We've a bit of baggage in our data infrastructure and, with our size, changes to procedures need to be coordinated through various divisions. Overall, Data Governance has been partially implemented though partnerships with statewide initiatives like CORE Districts (http://coredistricts.org/) that have forced us into better behaviors. We're still struggling as a whole organization with issues of data privacy and compliance with federal and state law. We see so many people who now want to be data experts and want data to work with but don't understand data handling basics. My director spends lots of time working with various groups to help them understand what they can and cannot do. I'm using your strutil package today to clean up a load of PSAT data with missing id and bad names. I had these routines implemented in Visual Foxpro and was missing them with my move to Stata. Good to meet you. I'll be visiting your github pages. Stephen

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---- William Buchanan <notifications@github.com> wrote:

@sogervais I'm a bit of a polyglot myself. I have Stata, Mplus, Python, R, Java, JavaScript, SQL, QGIS, and several other languages in use on a relatively regular basis (python is a bit less often). Do you do any student enrollment projections for the purposes of staffing and/or redistricting attendance zones? My office is fairly new so right now the big push is focused on developing more robust data infrastructure and automating/standardizing some processes. -- You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #2 (comment)