Idaho education board leaves posts open

BOISE – Idaho’s Board of Education office is facing such a budget crisis that it’s keeping vacant all four of its top agency positions – from executive director to chief financial officer – to save money.

The agency, which handles such complicated issues as testing of all Idaho public schoolchildren and coordination of programs between the state’s universities, also is lacking a deputy director and chief academic officer. Until the end of the fiscal year in July, it plans to have various other employees with their own full-time jobs fill in for the missing officials.

“It’s been a struggle,” said Mike Rush, longtime administrator of Idaho’s Division of Professional-Technical Education, who’s now also acting as executive director for the office of the state board. “It obviously is not a permanent solution.”

The state board office had only 10 employees a decade ago, but that was before an 8-year political turf war between the board, appointed by a Republican governor, and the elected state superintendent of schools, who then was Democrat Marilyn Howard.

The board, whose members are eight volunteers and the superintendent, is the policy-setting board for education in Idaho ranging from kindergarten up to the Ph.D. level; oversees additional functions such as the state library and historical society, public broadcasting and vocational rehabilitation; and also serves as the board of regents for each of Idaho’s public universities. The elected superintendent runs the state Department of Education, which is responsible for overseeing education and operations in the state’s 114 school districts and charter schools.

But amid the turf war, the board office staff ballooned over the past decade to 27 and took on new duties. High among them was running the giant testing program that has had every third- through 10th-grader take the Idaho Standards Achievement Test twice – or in some cases three times – every year.

At the heart of the board’s financial crisis is the testing program, which the board wrenched away from the superintendent as the federal No Child Left Behind Act began to require annual testing of students in grades three through eight, plus a high-stakes graduation test in high school. The testing program that the board office helped put together went further – testing students both spring and fall in grades two through 10, with an option for school districts to offer a third test in the winter.

All that testing, on top of other state-required tests like the Idaho Reading Indicator, the Direct Math Assessment, the Direct Writing Assessment and more, has sparked protests from educators statewide that too much school time now is being spent in testing. A committee of the state Board of Education is studying that issue now.

In 2006, federal officials notified the board office that the ISAT wasn’t sufficiently aligned to standards the state had set for what kids should learn in each grade. “The kids were getting tested, but not necessarily on the board-approved Idaho standards,” Rush said. That bombshell came when thousands of schoolchildren already had taken the 90-minute ISAT tests multiple times.

“That’s when we had to redo the testing process,” Rush said. “And what we found when we went out to bid on the test … we found it was very expensive to do what the feds wanted us to do, to align the test to the standards.”

The bid from the previous testing contractor, Northwest Evaluation Association, which the state had paid $9 million over five years, was deemed non-responsive for the new testing contract. So the state signed a contract with the only other bidder, Data Recognition Corp., for a base amount of $22 million over four years. The base contract for this year is $4.95 million, but it includes add-ons boosting the cost to $7.9 million. The base cost for next year is $5.9 million.

One of the add-ons was for ISAT testing for second and ninth graders, which isn’t required by the federal law but was included in the previous contract. The office of the state board sought a supplemental appropriation from the Legislature during its 2007 session for $750,000 to fund the second- and ninth-grade testing. Lawmakers said they’d consider the request if Gov. Butch Otter went along, but he didn’t, and it remained unfunded.

The item stayed in the contract add-ons anyway, and state board rules required the second- and ninth-grade testing. This fall, the board canceled second-grade testing, but ninth-graders were tested – and the board office fell into a huge financial hole. This week, ninth-grade testing for this spring was canceled.

“It’s disturbing that an agency would get to the position that it appears to be in,” said Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint, vice-chairwoman of the Legislature’s joint budget committee. “They made a commitment to fund things that they didn’t have the budget to do. … That is just plain wrong.”

Otter agreed, and in September ordered a full accounting and “cost-saving actions necessary to cover the shortfall.”

The board’s then-executive director, Karen McGee, resigned. She’d only had the position for five months. The chief financial and academic officers had left in July, and the deputy director/policy officer followed in October. The board office has had four different executive directors, counting Rush, in the past two years.

Milford Terrell, president of the board, told Otter in an Oct. 9 letter, “The board is continuing its review of the activities of its staff and others to determine what actions and decisions might have contributed to these financial and operational issues, and is committed to taking appropriate action as may be necessary.”

Both Rush and Otter’s budget chief, Wayne Hammon, say they’re optimistic that the board office is on track now to get its budget under control. “It’s incredibly important that it get done right,” said Rush, who started his dual job in September.

Keough said, “I do have a lot of confidence in Mike Rush. He’s proven to be a steady leader.”

The senator said few people understand the huge array of tasks and issues the state board is asked to oversee. “This may well be an opportunity to take a look at that,” she said.

When asked if the governor is looking at shifting some of the duties back from the board office to the state Department of Education – now headed by Republican Tom Luna with a staff of 129 – Otter’s spokesman, Jon Hanian, said only, “Tune in to the State of the State.”

Otter will give his State of the State address to lawmakers, laying out his agenda for the coming legislative session, on Jan. 7.