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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Idaho ed chief seeks bare-bones software

Associated Press

BOISE — State Schools Superintendent Marilyn Howard is working on a bare-bones version of a student tracking program recently scrapped by the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation.

Details of Howard’s salvage plan will not be available until next week, said Allison Westfall, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education.

The foundation, whose multimillion dollar contributions have made it a leading influence in Idaho education, announced three years ago it would put $35 million toward an advanced computer system that would allow schools to track students in more detail than ever before.

But foundation officials said they were ending the effort to create the Idaho Student Information Management System after a recent review found the system would have cost the state and the foundation $180 million over the next five years. The foundation will work to help the districts in the transition, officials said.

In a letter to district superintendents, Howard wrote that she wants districts to have an affordable way to efficiently gather and use student data.

“To that end, I will ask the Legislature for funding to support a bare-bones student information system that can utilize some common software currently in use in districts,” she said.

Howard’s billion-dollar education budget proposal for next year includes $5 million that was originally intended as the state’s first payment on maintenance of the ISIMS project.

Howard intends to ask the Legislature to use that money to develop a scaled-down version. Howard was a proponent of student-tracking systems even before Albertson Foundation took on the project. She worked with the foundation to get the ISIMS project launched.

Meanwhile, school officials are reeling after the foundation’s announcement. Many districts had put money of their own into the project.

Steve Knox, the technology coordinator for the Kellogg School District, had volunteered his district to help pilot the program.

From the start, he said, it was difficult.

The small Silver Valley district’s hodgepodge network and aging computers weren’t able to handle the sophisticated software, so Kellogg had to upgrade. They pulled money from an already tight school budget and relied on grants to help cover the cost.

“We’ve got a huge, huge, huge amount of time and energy invested in learning the software and passing that information down to the teachers and getting them to accept it,” Knox said. “We spent weeks and weeks with secretaries and other people down in Boise getting trained.”

Knox said the district will likely go back to the software it used before. The district also will have to find a way to report the additional information No Child Left Behind requires. The old software doesn’t have some of those capabilities.

Knox said he estimates the change will cost the district “many thousands of dollars.”

Kuna, another of the pilot districts, has spent about $300,000 to upgrade district technology to accommodate the ISIMS system they now won’t get. But district officials said that money is not wasted: The spending on improved technology will help with the other computer programs the district operates.