OPE report: State has wasted $61M on failed instructional management system

The state has spent $61 million on a failed statewide instructional management system called Schoolnet, according to a new performance evaluation out this morning from the Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations. “Poor management, poor decisions, and poor system functionality compounded themselves and prevented the goals for a statewide instructional management system from being realized,” Rakesh Mohan, OPE director, told the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee this morning.

Rep. Gayle Batt, R-Wilder, called it “sickening results, if you ask me.” She said, “I think we’ve been waiting to hear this report. … You see that there’s $61 million, you think, wow, that would have gone a long way for roads.”

House Minority Leader John Rusche, D-Lewiston, agreed. “This is just , it’s more than disheartening,” he said, “and I think even though the department may have changed leadership, that we need to make sure that things are investigated a little further and people tell us how this has been made so that it doesn’t happen again. It seems to be every year we find somebody has a great idea, and doesn’t check it out, doesn’t build a good RFP, dsn’t build a good plan, doesn’t manage the plan, and we end up spending tens of millions of dollars of citizens’ money, and then of course we claim poverty on why we can’t support the teachers or the other services.”

Rusche said, “I think we should demand more accountability. I haven’t seen that from the executive, thus far, so maybe we should be doing that.”

The report found that the Schoolnet system, funded in part by a grant from the Albertson Foundation, was “overly ambitious given the capabilities of the product it selected to use.” The state Department of Education selected a vendor who had designed a product for a pilot project, not for statewide use, and then rolled it out statewide. Only designated pilot districts received training, professional development and technical support. The project was compared to “trying to build a plane while flying it.” Many of the problems were similar to those with the ISEE project, and the earlier failed ISIMS project. You can read a summary of the report here ; the full report is online here .

Batt asked, “Is this program still ongoing and is it still getting money from the state?” Mohan replied, “The program is still ongoing, I think it is $2.5 million in ongoing maintenance cost. Our conversations with the department, Tim Corder, they have been talking about scaling it back to some degree, but no detailed plans have been mentioned.”