The sa国际传媒 government kept crucial information from the Saanich school district while the district was forced to scrap a project that took years of work and more than a million dollars. The district was working to create a homegrown system to track student registrations, grades and attendance for schools across the province. But it abandoned work on openStudent in March when the government said it would have to be integrated with the new sa国际传媒 Services Card, a single identity and health card. However, a freedom of information request from the district has revealed that five months earlier, the government鈥檚 own version of the student-record system was exempted from the requirement. District officials estimated the province could have saved $100 million by using openStudent to replace the problem-plagued sa国际传媒 Enterprise Student Information System.
BCeSIS was troublesome from the start. In 2009, the sa国际传媒 Teachers鈥� Federation considered boycotting the system to stop further implementation until concerns were addressed. Teachers found the system slow, archaic and frustrating.
In 2011, the province announced it would replace BCeSIS and sought proposals for a new system. At the same time, the Saanich school district was working on its own system. It invested about $1.5 million in the project, converted three classrooms in a former elementary school to high-tech offices and hired computer programmers.
The idea was to use local expertise to develop a student-information system that was made by sa国际传媒 schools for sa国际传媒 schools 鈥� and do it for a fraction of what it costs to buy and operate a commercial product.
By taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source tools, Saanich officials expected to develop the openStudent system for under $5 million, with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million. The government says it spent $97 million over 10 years on BCeSIS.
Saanich officials were not too concerned when the government decided to purchase a commercial product to replace BCeSIS. It was their understanding that school districts would not be forced into a particular system.
By January 2013, the core components of openStudent were completed. Several school districts were to begin using the system this fall.
In July 2013, the government selected IT giant Fujitsu to supply a system used in the U.K. and in 14 states, with provincewide implementation set for 2015.
In March 2014, the Saanich district scrapped openStudent after being told that the system had to integrate with the sa国际传媒 Services Card, which would likely cost millions. The ministry didn鈥檛 tell the district that the government鈥檚 own system, known as MyEducationBC, was given an exemption to the services-card requirement until 2018.
The government argues that the requirement is still in place, and MyEducationBC is only exempted temporarily. But the information about the exemption was important enough that it should have been given to Saanich, especially considering that Saanich officials maintained they had been misled throughout the project about the requirement to integrate with the services card.
Education Ministry officials say the Saanich district should have known about integration from the start.
Some legitimate concerns were expressed about the capabilities of an open-source system, but with the huge difference in estimated annual operating costs 鈥� less than $1 million for the Saanich system as opposed to more than $9 million for the commercial system 鈥� it was certainly worth trying.
The government is asking school districts to do more with less, and the Saanich district diligently pursued that course, with the potential to save school districts money. It should have been assisted, not hindered.
