High School Transcripts. The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) adopts rules for standardized high school transcripts, which all school districts must use. The required contents of the high school transcript include identifying information for the student and district; the student's academic history for all high school level courses, including withdrawals, marks and grades earned, credits attempted and earned, and grade point average; and a list of previous schools where credit was attempted. OSPI rule further establishes a standard grade reporting and calculation system and criteria for calculating grade point average.

The Legislature has directed OSPI to develop and update a standardized high school transcript in consultation with other entities before the 2026-27 school year. The standardized transcript must include a notation for students that have earned the Washington State Seal of Biliteracy. The Legislature also directed the State Board of Education, in consultation with other entities, to develop a format for a competency-based education high school transcript by the 2026-27 school year.

Washington School Information Processing Cooperative. The Washington School Information Processing Cooperative (WSIPC) is a public, nonprofit cooperative that provides K-12 public and private schools with services including data reporting, technology services, a purchasing program, and software support.

The School Information Processing Cooperative of Washington's Educational Service districts is authorized to develop, maintain, and govern a statewide digital transcript file standard and a secure, platform-independent environment for the exchange of transcript data between secondary and postsecondary institutions. The digital transcript data-sharing environment must support a secure, two-way exchange of transcript information.

School districts, charter schools, state tribal education compact schools, and public institutions of higher education must participate in the statewide digital transcript data-sharing environment. Private four-year not-for-profit institutions of higher education may participate in the statewide digital transcript data-sharing environment. Permission by these entities satisfies data-sharing authorization requirements between participating entities for purposes covered by this section and eliminates the need for individual bilateral data-sharing agreements.  

Disclosure of digital transcript data may occur only with express permission of the student, or the student's parent or guardian, and such permission must be revocable.

PRO: This bill modernizes government by creating a digital transcript system. Currently, transcripts can be sent over email but those files are images—PDFs that must be manually entered into the recipient's system. At Eastern Washington University, this process takes more than 1300 hours of staff time each year. A standardized digital format would allow transcript information to flow directly into the recipient's system, creating greater accuracy and faster admission decisions.

High schools already keep student data in a digital format, but they must turn it into a printed document or PDF to send it to a college, which then turns it back into data. This is inefficient and unnecessary, taking significant staff time on both the secondary and postsecondary sides. The transcript process is also confusing for students, especially those students who do not have strong counselor or family support.

A broad consortium of secondary and postsecondary stakeholders have been working to identify necessary data to include in the file standard. One of the challenges is getting data-sharing agreements with every participant, but this bill addresses that permission and will help move this from theory into practice.

It is important to make sure this is not duplicative of the high school and beyond plan. Section 1(b) would benefit from a statement about extending the education official status so the bill aligns with FERPA.

No public hearing was held.

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