The Colorado Department of Education

Offices | Staff Contacts | Colorado.gov

RITS Educator Identifier Policies

School districts vary on how they keep employee data. Suggesting commonly accepted ways of entering data can help decrease duplicates, increase the overall effectiveness of RITS Educator and minimize confusion for the district user. Please read these suggested guidelines for using RITS Educator to search for and assign EDID's.

Educator Name

  • Conduct an educator search first!  Always do a search to verify if there is an EDID number already in the system.
  • Use full legal names for all educators, this includes the complete middle name whenever possible.
  • Please follow the name that appears on the educators legal documentation for entry into the RITS Educator System.
  • Use NMN in the middle name field if the legal documentation states there is no legal middle name. 
  • Only use letters and common punctuation in the name fields. The only acceptable punctuation is a - dash, a space, and an ' apostrophe.
  • Use spaces to separate multiple names except when hyphenation is used on legal documentation. The RITS Educator Matching Engine treats a hyphen as a different character and could miss a match on a name that uses a space instead. 
  • If an employee's name ends with 'Junior', please enter it in the last name field with the last name first, then a space, then Jr without a period.
  • Don't use nicknames, like "Johnny" for John, as these are variables and hard to track.
  • Use Roman numerals to indicate generation number, if part of the legal name.

Date of Birth

  • Always check legal documentation for the correct birth date. Be aware that many foreign birth certificates have the month and day reversed from American formats.
  • Be careful not to use the birth certificate issue date instead of the date of birth. 
  • Enter the date of birth as MM/DD/YYYY, including the back slashes between month/day and day/year.
  • If the handwriting on your documentation is poor, check with the employee or other documentation. A 4 can easily be mistaken for a 9. 

Social Security Numbers

  • Always check legal documentation for the correct SSN.
  • Enter the SSN without any dashes.
  • Verify that you have entered the SSN correctly before moving onto the next field.

LAEDID

  • The LAEDID is an optional field. We will leave the field in the system for the users that would like to use this field. You have three choices when populating this field, use all zeros, leave the field blank or assign the number as per the file layout specifications, your four digit district code followed by your districts assigned educator number.