In October 2017, California's SB-179 (the Gender Recognition Act) was signed into law officially recognizing "nonbinary" as a legal gender in California. As such, we have built support for nonbinary genders inside Aeries.

To support California SB-179 we created a new GN field in Aeries in the STU table which replaces the old STU.SX field. Additionally, GN fields were created in IDN, ATS, MST, SMS, SMB, and TCH. Every page and report in Aeries was evaluated and adjusted appropriately to support district customizable Gender values in Aeries.

State Reporting / Legal Student Demographic Information

CALPADS supports nonbinary genders as of the 2019-2020 school year.   Per CALPADS:  In reporting a pupil’s gender in CALPADS, LEAs should report the current gender (or sex) that they have recorded for that pupil on the mandatory permanent pupil record. However, there is no specific requirement regarding what documents LEAs should review or require, or what specific process LEAs should follow, in determining the gender to be recorded on the mandatory permanent pupil record, or whether and when to update that recorded gender.  

More information on adding Legal Student Demographic data can be found here: 

Student Legal Information - Student Demographic Page

Important Information to review:

https://www.cde.ca.gov/re/di/eo/faqs.asp

Default Gender Codes

The new version of Aeries which includes the gender changes will ship with three default gender values: Male, Female, and Nonbinary. Districts can customize the gender values based on decisions made by their district by adding the codes and values in the Code Table.

To add new gender codes, filter for the Update Code Table form.

The Update Code Table form will open. To add a new code to a field dropdown, first select the STU table and GN field from the Update Code Table form.  

The Fixed Codes for STU.GN are displayed at the top right-hand part of the form. The current gender codes assigned to students from student data are displayed on the lower right-hand part of the form. Districts can add records to customize their gender codes as needed. Districts can also inactivate the default hard coded gender codes added by Aeries.

To add gender codes, click the “Add New Record” button.

The Edit form will display.

Enter your custom Code and Description. Additionally, Aeries default gender codes can be inactivated if necessary.  

More information on Code Table Management can be found here:

Code Table Management - Overview

District Settings - Default Gender

A Districts default gender can be set in the District Settings form. After navigating to School Info | District Settings in the District, the following page will display:

To set a Default Gender code click the “Change” button located at the bottom of the District Settings page. Place a check-mark in the Default Gender code checkbox. The gender codes previously defined in the Update Code Table form will be listed in the drop-down. Select your district's default gender code and click Save.

More information on District Settings can be found here: District Settings

Querying Gender Fields

The new gender field is queried by using STU.GN. Aeries will continue to update the STU.SX field as you use STU.GN for backwards compatibility. Thus, both the STU.SX field and the STU.GN field will match, it will not be necessary to change any queries that use STU.SX to STU.GN.