Chapter 3: The LEAP File Format – What You Need to Report

Understanding the LEAP File

LEAP stands for Local Educational Agency Program file. Unlike other CALPADS files that report student-level data by school site, the LEAP file gets submitted at the LEA level — one file per district covering all expanded learning programs across all sites. That distinction matters because it shapes how you organize data collection and QA processes.

The LEAP file captures student participation in expanded learning programs during the academic year, which CALPADS defines as July 1 through June 30. Even though most afterschool programs run during the traditional school calendar (roughly September through May), the reporting window spans the full fiscal year. This matters for districts running summer programs or implementing Attendance Recovery programs that may begin banking instructional hours as early as July 1.

Required Data Elements

Per CALPADS File Specifications v17.0 (effective July 1, 2025), the LEAP file requires these core data elements:

Student Identification:

• State Student ID (SSID)
• Local Student ID
• Legal First Name, Middle Name, Last Name
• Birth Date
• Gender

Program Information:

• Program Type (ASES, ELO-P, 21st CCLC/ASSETS)
• School Site of Enrollment
• Program Start Date
• Program End Date (if applicable)

Attendance Data:

• Field 26.07: Expanded Learning Program Days

Field 26.07 is the heart of the LEAP file. It captures the total number of days a student attended an expanded learning program during the academic year (July 1 – June 30). The valid range is 0 to 300 days.

Why 300? The academic year spans a full 365 days (July 1 – June 30), and some students participate in multiple programs or attend sessions on weekends, during breaks, or throughout the summer. A student who attends afterschool programming 180 days during the regular school year and then joins a 20-day summer enrichment program would have 200 total ELP days. CDE set 300 as the upper bound to accommodate these combinations while flagging anything implausibly high.

The 0 value matters too. If a student enrolled in an expanded learning program but never attended a session, populate Field 26.07 with “0” rather than leaving it blank. That tells CDE the student was offered programming (satisfying grant participation requirements) but didn’t attend — a different data point than no record at all.

Student Enrollment Data and Registration Forms

Before a student appears in your LEAP file, they need to be enrolled in your expanded learning program with a signed registration form on file. This has always been required for ASES, ELO-P, and 21st CCLC programs, but it carries more weight now that submissions go through CALPADS and are subject to audit.

The documentation trail is straightforward:

1. Parent/guardian signs registration form consenting to student participation
2. Student attends programming sessions documented through daily sign-in/sign-out
3. Attendance records are aggregated to calculate total days of participation
4. Data flows into LEAP file for submission to CALPADS
5. Backup documentation is maintained for audit or data quality questions

If your enrollment process is informal — verbal agreements, email confirmations, or a general “students just show up” approach — you’ll need to tighten up. CALPADS requires a clear, auditable link between enrollment documentation and reported participation.

Daily Attendance Tracking: The 0-300 Days Methodology

Calculating “days of attendance” seems straightforward until you get into the details.

Full-Day Attendance: A student who attends an expanded learning session for the expected duration (whether that’s 2, 3, or 4 hours based on grant requirements) counts as one day of participation.

Partial-Day Attendance: This is where it gets tricky. ELP participation for CALPADS purposes is reported in whole days. A student who arrives late or leaves early from an afterschool session would generally still count as attending that day, but your district should set clear policies on minimum attendance thresholds. Note: this is different from Attendance Recovery, where instructional hours accumulate toward ADA funding recovery and don’t follow the same whole-day reporting logic.

Multi-Program Participation: If a student attends multiple expanded learning programs in a single day — a before-school literacy program in the morning and an afterschool STEM program in the afternoon — you need a clear protocol for counting it. CDE guidance suggests counting each distinct program session by program type, but don’t double-count the same student-day across multiple LEAP file entries.

Summer and Intersession Programs: Any expanded learning programming between July 1 and June 30 counts toward the total. A student who attends a 15-day summer program in July 2025 and then participates in afterschool programming during the 2025-26 school year would have those summer days included in their Field 26.07 value.

For most districts, the simplest approach is tracking daily attendance (present/absent) for each program session, then summing total days present across the full academic year. That aligns with existing grant reporting practices and produces the data element CALPADS needs.

Program Type Classification

The LEAP file requires you to identify which expanded learning funding stream supports each student’s participation:

• ASES (After School Education and Safety Program)
• ELO-P (Expanded Learning Opportunities Program)
• 21st CCLC (21st Century Community Learning Centers), including ASSETS

CDE uses this classification to track participation rates and program reach across funding streams. It also matters for district budgeting and compliance — you need to know which students are served by which grants.

If your district runs multiple programs at one school site — say, an ASES program for elementary students and an ASSETS program for high schoolers — maintain clear program boundaries in your data systems. A student shouldn’t appear under multiple program types for the same period unless they genuinely participated in multiple distinct programs.

LEA-Level vs. School-Level Reporting

LEAP is an LEA-level file, but it does capture which school site each student attends. That matters for three reasons:

1. Data Validation: CDE cross-references your LEAP file against other CALPADS files (like SENR) to confirm that students you report as ELP participants are actually enrolled in your district.

2. Program Monitoring: Even though the file is submitted at the LEA level, CDE can break down data by school site to track program distribution and participation patterns across your district.

3. Quality Assurance: LEA-level submission means your CALPADS coordinator owns the final file, but data quality depends on accurate attendance tracking at each site. You need clear workflows for how site-level data rolls up to the district.

Attendance Recovery Hour Tracking Within ELP Data

Attendance Recovery has its own reporting requirements (covered in Section 3 and the dedicated AR chapter), but there’s an important intersection with ELP data. Some districts run AR programs within their expanded learning operations — using afterschool, weekend, or summer sessions for both enrichment and ADA funding recovery.

If you take this approach, track hours carefully to satisfy both reporting requirements. Students in these dual-purpose sessions would:

• Accumulate days of participation for ELP reporting in the LEAP file (Field 26.07)
• Accrue instructional hours for AR funding recovery in the STAS file (Field 13.24)

The key distinction: not all ELP time qualifies for AR (it must meet specific instructional standards and teacher certification requirements under EC §46211), and not all ELP students are AR-eligible (they must have absent days for which the district can recover ADA funding). Your data systems need to differentiate between the two.

We’ll explore this intersection in detail in Section 6.

Validation Rules and Fatal Errors

The LEAP file runs through validation rules that check data quality and logical consistency. Per CALPADS Update Flash #305, Table 5 documents the specific LEAP validation rules:

Fatal CVR Error — Missing LEAP Records: If your district receives ELO-P funding, holds a CCLC (including ASSETS) grant, or has an ASES grant, you’re required to submit LEAP records. No LEAP records when data are expected triggers a fatal Certification Validation Rule error. Your Fall 1 or EOY submission can’t be certified until it’s resolved.

Data Range Validations: Field 26.07 must be between 0 and 300. Values outside this range get rejected.

Cross-File Validations: CALPADS checks that students in your LEAP file also appear in your SENR file. Report a student as an ELP participant who isn’t enrolled in your district, and you’ll get an error.

Program Type Validations: Program type codes must match CDE’s valid code set. Outdated or incorrect codes trigger validation errors.

The target is zero validation errors at certification. Unlike some reporting systems that let you certify with warnings and explanations, CALPADS requires clean data. That’s why the validation checkpoints in Section 5 matter — catch and fix errors before submission deadlines, not during the narrow certification window.

Practical Implications

For afterschool program administrators, LEAP file requirements come down to four operational needs:

1. Accurate Daily Attendance: Track which students attend which sessions on which days, consistently, throughout the full academic year.

2. Clear Program Boundaries: Associate students with specific program types (ASES, ELO-P, 21st CCLC) so funding sources are reported accurately.

3. Data Aggregation: At year’s end, sum each student’s total days of participation across all sessions to populate Field 26.07.

4. Integration with District Systems: Your afterschool attendance data needs to flow into your district’s CALPADS submission workflow — which means integration with your SIS or a data transfer process to your CALPADS coordinator.

If these capabilities don’t exist today — if you’re tracking attendance on paper rosters, standalone spreadsheets, or disconnected software — LEAP compliance will require systems upgrades, process changes, or both.

Next up: the other key CALPADS file for expanded learning compliance — the Student Absence Summary (STAS) file, which captures Attendance Recovery data and intersects with chronic absenteeism reporting.