Excerpts from PelicanPressOnline.com article:

School board OK's new district software package
Technology upgrade was overdue, adminsitrators say

  CrossPointe.net, an Orlando based software developer and service provider for school districts, will facilitate the change - providing the software, licensing, maintenance, support and project implementation services. The Web-based system is expected to be in place by August 2010.

  "We are excited," said Leona M. Campos, director of techonology and information services for the Sarasota district. "This is something that should have been done long ago. But we will get there."

  The current system has been in use in the district for the past 26 years. "It was developed in the '60s and implemented in the '70s," Campos said. "That is extremely old technology."

  The school district has struggled with that outdated software, using multiple other systems to support it. "It has been band-aided and band-aided again and again." Bob Hanson, chief information officer for the district and the county, told the school board during a Dec. 9 work session as he advocated for approval of the project. "It takes nine people to maintain it. With the new system, it will take only a contract."

  Every aspect of finances and human resources in the school district - such as inventory tracking, budget, payroll, and student information - are handled on the old system, denying the adminsitration the ability to make quick and inteligent decisions, Campos pointed out.

 "We had to rely on an integrated spread sheet. A simple query took hours to answer. There was no way of communicating information from one department to another," said Campos.

  Once the new system is set up, information will be available to any employee from anywhere. Parents will have access to student information in all grades from kindergarten through high school, the board members learned. Additionally, all recruitment, employee transactions and employment information will be handled online without paper.

 Grades would be reported accurately, Hanson and Campos noted, thus eliminating the embarrassment the existing system has caused when colleges have tried to verify grades.

 The district partnered with CrossPointe.net to develop the new system, thus lowering the district's implementation cost while helping the software company create a product it could sell to other school systems.

 The school board members, who have been weighing every request for expense, were generally supportive of the project.

 Vice chair Shirley Brown asked what would happen to the employees who would be displaced by the new system. Superintendent Lori White assured her they would be redirected to other distrct jobs.

 Brown also asked how parents would be able to access their children's data.

 "Eighty percent of the parents under the Sarasota County school system have access to broadband at home," Hanson assured her, referring to high-speed Internet access. "The remaining 20 percent can access it in libraries." Board member Kathy Kleinlein called the new software a good investment . "Think of textbooks," she said. "We need to upgrade them periodically. The technology also needs upgrading.

 "When we got ActivBoards," she said, "other school districts came to see [that equipment]. This is the next step."

 Calling it "a significant investment in the future," Kleinlein said the new system would help students make academic advances.

 Board member Frank Kovach agreed: "Considering we are spending more money to support this obsolete system, it is better to invest in a new system."

 White called it a "healthy investment, adding, "We have to think deeply on expenditure, but that doesn't mean we have to stop spending. We have to spend smart," she said. "this change would serve the district well ..."

By Liberty D. Veedon
PelicanPressOnline.com
January 8, 2009