If your Catholic school is an NCEA member, you can use Gradelink to automate the creation of the NCEA Databank Report. One click lets you verify the report and make changes as necessary, before exporting an Excel spreadsheet for submission.


To preview the NCEA Report, all you need to do is go to the Administrator Reports tab and click "NCEA Report". 



If you don't see this button in your interface, please contact Gradelink Support to enable NCEA reporting for your school. Then, perform the following steps:

  1. Update the School Profile
  2. Verify Ethnicity/Race Settings
  3. Verify Staff information
  4. Verify Student information


Step 1 - Update the School Profile

The school profile can be accessed by going to the Settings tab and then clicking on "School Profile".



In the School Profile, the "Catholic Info", "Day Care/Preschool", and "Gov't Programs" sections should all be updated prior to running the report. Pay special attention to the "Previous Year Graduates" and "Current Year Entering" fields on the Catholic Info page. By default these fields are calculated automatically, but they can be switched to 'Manual', allowing you to adjust the numbers as you see fit.



If you don't have access to these areas of the School Profile, please contact Gradelink Support to have them made available to you.


Step 2 - Verify Ethnicity/Race Settings

Gradelink is flexible and allows schools to define their own ethnicity and race categories as they see fit, or even avoid using the feature altogether.


However, the NCEA Report requires very specific racial categories:

  • American Indian / Native Alaskan: Individual identifies as one of the two classifications of native Americans;
  • Asian: Individual identifies as having origins in Far East, Southeast Asia or Indian Sub-continent (Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.);
  • Black / African American: Individual identifies with any of the Black racial groups whether from the United States, Africa, or other parts of the world;
  • Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander: Individual identifies as a native Hawaiian living anywhere in the US (does not include non-Hawaiian residents of Hawaii) as well as other Pacific Islands (Guam, Samoa, Fiji, Micronesia, Polynesia, etc.);
  • White: Individual identifies as Caucasian from any part of the world (including Middle East) that does not identify as one of the other groups;
  • Two or more races: Individual identifies with more than one racial group;


This does not mean that you need to reset the ethnicity or race categories that have been setup for your school. Instead, you can make use of the Federal and NCEA Race Mapping tool, which allows you to associate your existing categories with the NCEA categories.


To access the Race Mapping tool, first go to the Race Designations page in the Settings tab.



To map your existing ethnicity or race categories to Federal or NCEA Race categories:

  1. Select an existing race designation from the list on the right.
  2. Select the Federal or NCEA race designation you would like to map it to.
  3. Hit Save.



Note for schools regarding Ethnicity and Race: Current Federal and NCEA reporting guidelines call for Hispanic/Latino students to be reported as such under their "Ethnicity" rather than "Race". Your school may or may not already be set up with this 2-part question, either on your enrollment forms or on the Student Demographics page. As such, if Hispanic or Latino is specified under race, whether in conjunction with other races or not, Gradelink will automatically count the student as "Hispanic/Latino" for Ethnicity. Otherwise, they will be counted as "Not Hispanic/Latino" for ethnicity. Since Hispanic/Latino is not considered a valid response for race (per Federal guidelines), schools can opt to map such students to another valid race designation. Otherwise, such students will be automatically counted as "Unknown" for race which is also considered a valid response. 


Step 3 - Verify Staff information

The NCEA Report pulls information from existing Staff and Student profiles, so the next step is to ensure that the appropriate information has been entered in Gradelink.



From the Staff tab, make sure that the following fields have been completed for each Staff member:

  • Employment Type
  • Professional Level
  • Race
  • Hispanic
  • Catholic


Step 4 - Verify Student information

Unlike Staff accounts, Student accounts will have additional questions regarding the NCEA Census.



From the Demographics section of the Student tab, make sure that the following fields have been completed for each Student:

  • Ethnicity
  • Race
  • NCEA Census


If you can't access any of these fields, please contact Gradelink Support.


After you've updated your school profile and verified that your database has the correct information, you will be able to run the NCEA Report.



When you generate the Report in Gradelink, it will display the data arranged to match the "NCEA School" tab of the NCEA Databank Collection Excel Workbook. See the picture above for an example.



When you click "Export to Excel" to download the Report as a spreadsheet, the data will instead be formatted to match the "DataOnly" tab of the NCEA Databank Collection Excel Workbook. This will be the file you submit to your Diocesan Schools Office.