

School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters - japhyr
http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/saanich-school-district-builds-own-software-to-handle-student-data-defies-doubters-1.51944

======
jasonpbecker
I'm pretty familiar with this problem space having worked in both a state
department of education and a school district.

I would not expect this to be a long term success. Virtually every district of
reasonable size starts with a homegrown and maintained solution and ends up
going with one of the big guys for lots of reasons.

1\. Security/liability. You have to have pretty damn good systems here and
definitely want to point at someone else's assurances and contract that allows
for recourse.

2\. Rapidly changing business requirements. This is everything from state and
federal reporting requirements to the expectations of end users. It's hard
enough to maintain these core systems and keep folks around who are good
enough to do it. Now deal with changing technology (oh you want a parent
portal? Oh, you don't want to use Flash/Java for iPads? Oh you want ...) and
you really can't attract and retain the kind of software people you'd want to
continually redesign, refactor, rebuild, extend, and expand. Development on
these systems never stops, which is why it's often easier to just drop off the
old and buy the new hotness. It's also why scale is so helpful with these
systems. If your users want this, someone else already requested it or will
shortly. A lot of the improvements in these systems happen because of how many
users they have and can be made because the cost is spread across all those
users.

3\. Interoperability with other systems. Most of these systems are not omnibus
catchall solutions for the entire business needs of a school district. That's
probably for the better-- the folks who try to do that end up doing it very
poorly. But you will want your HR and payroll to talk to your student
information system that should probably talk to your assessment system that
should talk to your curriculum management system that should talk to your
special education IEP case load management system, etc. It's hard to do this
and even harder when your solution is built to work in one context. Standards
here have only barely helped. Middleware is expensive, shitty work. Again, not
easy to attract killer talent and it is a constant need. The big boys have
everything else built and just focus on middleware and have probably already
worked with and written what's required for all of the popular systems you are
using in these other areas.

This is just the smallest fraction of reasons it's a huge PITA to write and
maintain these systems. That's not to say that it can't be done but it is to
say that this is not a small, well-defined problem space with just a few
distinct end-user types and functional requirements that can be built once and
then monitored and tweaked over time. Not if you want to do the real stuff
that makes collecting and maintaining all of this data worthwhile.

~~~
2arrs2ells
While all three of your points are excellent concerns, I think you may be
giving off-the-shelf systems a little too much credit.

The SIS systems I know (US, K-12) do a mediocre job of updating quickly to new
technologies/requirements (#2) and do a terrible job of interoperating with
other systems through APIs (#3).

~~~
mgkimsal
Doubleplus agree. Have been working with a state department on a student
registration system for the past few years, and now everything's going to be
placed under one of the 'big commercial' players in this space. No interop
specs have been delivered/offered, and the integration team seems wholly
unaware of the complexities of the requirements laid out by the state for the
types of processes we have to comply with. And talk about 'not adapting'? We
have processes in our system relating to HR and the commercial team flat out
said "we don't want to deal with that", but also balked at offering us any
sort of integration service points (REST/SOAP/anything) to keep doing what we
need to do next year.

~~~
saurik
Would you be willing to touch on what the reasons were behind your department
deciding to switch to a "big commercial" player?

~~~
mgkimsal
I've honestly no clue - from my perspective it was a statewide edict passed
down last fall - there's probably more to it but I've not been filled in.

------
jmj42
I've actually thought of proposing such a project for our school district. I'm
not sure what we pay our current software, bu my thought was to develop a
summer STEM program and give HS students the opportunity to participate is a
real project with real consequences, etc.

Many of the school people (administrators/teachers) were very unhappy with the
previous system, so I expected it to be a reasonably easy sale. Unfortunately
I didn't have the necessary free time to pursue it much further than "thought
experiment." Since, the school district has purchased a new system that school
officials actually like.

That said, our school district (like most in Illinois) is facing some serious
budget crunch due to the state failing to make payment on time (or at all), so
maybe it's time to dial up this project again, and pitch it to the school
board.

~~~
japhyr
One of the big obstacles I see with this kind of model is the need to get
security rock-solid. Any system that deals with student information is subject
to federal privacy laws, and the consequences of a data leak would be pretty
significant.

Any thoughts on how to deal with this? I am wondering if os projects like the
one you describe could partner with an experienced mentor, but I still wonder
what kind of structure you'd want to use to address liability issues.

~~~
jmj42
See below. The accounting problem is a far greater challenge that security.
Interestingly school information systems are notoriously bad at security, so
hitting par won't actually be that hard. Accurate accounting may be a huge
challenge, though.

Either way, mentoring would be key, and no system developed vy students should
be allowed into production at a scholl without a complete review. But that
that's part of the process. Even in a private company/OSS project, code
shouldn't be allowed into production without a review. I do have access to
many people with the right skill set to be able to develop such a system on
their own (my self included) in addition to the fact that I work for an
information security research institution, so I have access to folks who know
a whole lot more about trusted systems than I.

Of course, HS students will make mistakes, but the mentors will be there to
review the work, and make suggestions, while keeping "bad code" from hitting a
production system.

In the end, I'm not sure that I'm convinced that a student developed system is
any different from one developed by some outside company.

~~~
mgkimsal
assuming that the majority of the work at commercial company X is done by
people who weren't long-ago HS students themselves, often with minimal
training and support at their company, I agree, there's likely very little
difference, other than the mistakes will be more open and easier for people to
see and fix.

------
sumukh1
It is totally possible for school districts to develop their own software. I
helped launch a similar project to create a mobile app for my school district
when I was in high school. Quotes from ed-tech companies were much more
expensive than our costs. We also made it open source so that other school
districts could use it.

Edit: Links

[1] App (now also on Google Play):
<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifusd/id454673943?mt=8>

[2] GitHub: <https://github.com/FremontUnified/>

~~~
zapt02
link?

------
LarryMade
I've done similar when working for a non-profit.

Having the tech guys on campus helps drive the development you get access to
the people who work with the data as well as updates on requirements of what
is needed (there's always something people will forget in a spec... until some
report is due and they mention it.) They can also bring in staff to test
components as they are being developed.

My thing was child care related; student tracking is a whole new level, key
things are relationships as in families, adults to children children to
education, teachers to children to classes to teachers to credentials, etc.
Plus whatever factors affect all that (social assistance qualifications,
immunizations, gpas, etc.)

Though once you get the core data figured out and organized (which is the
major bit) the rest starts falling into place.

It's not rocket science but it is a definitely a detailed data situation,
which you need people dedicated to it for years to put it all together.

As far as anything like that being "done" not in the public sector... you got
everything going then some new law changes and you need to adjust
tracking/claims based on some new factor or add in an adjusted reimbursement
calculation etc. so you have to restructure some data add some new entry
methods, new reports, etc. Easier on an open system than a closed system.

Problem with "canned" software is it is usually developed out of one district
with their own unique needs when it gets packaged as a one thing fits all it
needs to be patched for other conditions and environments... It is usually
geared for a specific administration staffing method, so buying something
canned may mean you have to do administrative changes in order to work with
the new system, etc.

It's good work though, and a nice challenge to sort out all the data and get
it collected, properly managed, and accessible to the right people.

------
swedegeek
For me, while it's absolutely no surprise, it's still quite depressing the
clear lobbying that is/will occur to trample this project. As others have
said, the cost seems quite realistic and I would put my money on the 8-person
having a much better handle on the end-users needs over some big consulting-
ware shop. But the big firms surely have great influence with those most able
to appropriate the funds for whatever solution B.C. opts to implement. There's
obviously maintenance, support, enhancement, etc. that must go on after
initial launch, but that still should not get anywhere near the monster price
from an outside vendor.

I hope their fate is not so dire. I will definitely be interested in updates
on the school district's efforts.

~~~
donw
It's a little amazing, when you think about it, that a lot of people think you
need to spend $100 million to build software to manage grades and attendance.

Especially as geeks in the startup world often build far more complicated
software on budgets quite a bit smaller than $5 million.

~~~
sopooneo
Even if all it did was grade and attendance. It is _not_ trivial to get that
right. My own little pet project <http://gradezilla.com> took years of
refinement before it could handle just those things. Tying in with other
aspects of a schools system makes it many multiple more complicated.

~~~
donw
That's fair, but it's still not a $100 million investment.

------
d4vlx
$97 million for this <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCeSIS>. The BC government
was milked. A system for a few thousand school administrators costing that
much and could not handle the load? The ineptitude boggles my mind.

Awesome to see there are some smart people out there fighting back.

------
kabdib
In the late 90s the San Francisco school district was sold a PeopleWare
system, whereupon they paid consultants millions of dollars to customize the
package. 'Twas a failure; they tossed it all away.

I don't remember the details, though I was feeling their pain, having to deal
with (a) the unbelievably horrid, steaming pile that is PeopleWare, and (b)
the clouds of consultants that start calling you up and pumping you for money
once it is out that you're doing an install of the pile. (Hint: You don't need
any help from a high-price consultant to install PeopleWare. You need a can of
gasoline and a match).

So the thought of a school district doing this on their own makes me smile.
They could do worse!

------
jarvuschris
Technology and software in schools in one of the most corrupt, backwards, and
destructive markets around. Schools must take charge of their own software and
destiny with a robust open-source economy.

The Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia, runs on
an open source SIS we've developed for under $100K and it has been in
production for over 3 years. We are working now build an alliance between
several like schools to share the maintenence and development costs of
supporting a public release.

If this group is planning on spending $5 million, we're still dealing with
enterprise salesman hiring amateur or out-of-date developers. Give me another
$100K and I'll put money in hackers' pockets to build quality software and
make sure no other schools _have_ to pay for the same thing twice. This is
more of the same crap, there's a whole new generation of developers that don't
have access to the school software market, and it's students that are losing
out because of it. The developers that built all the sites and apps this
community knows and loves wouldn't need anywhere near $5 million to build this
SIS and it wouldn't look like it got left over from 1999

------
Falling3
1.5 million, close to 2 years and a "small band" of programmers to deliver a
specialized product working on-site with the end users. Call me naive, but
this sounds completely reasonable to me.

~~~
betterunix
I think the "doubters" are just not used to seeing that sort of thing. They
probably think the approach is going to look more like this:

[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organiza...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/office_of_payroll_administration_nyc/citytime/index.html)

You know, the case where you hire a team of contractors to build something,
and then that team totally screws up, goes years past the deadline, and
charges you enormous amounts of money. Meanwhile, there are ready-to-ship
products out there that can be bought for a yearly fee, which carry less risk
but higher costs.

------
japhyr
I am watching this project pretty closely, because I believe pretty strongly
that there is much room in education for some high-quality os software. I also
believe this software has the potential to facilitate some pretty significant
change in public education. I really want to see some high-quality os
solutions become prominent in the education world.

The software development world has had numerous os tools for decades: vim,
emacs, apache, to name just a few. I can't think of anything equivalent in
education. Most teachers are still writing their lesson plans in Word or its
equivalent, which is like writing your code in notepad without any coding-
specific extensions.

There is lots of room to improve ed tech, and some of these improvements need
to be open source to have any meaningful widespread impact.

~~~
keithpeter
" _Most teachers are still writing their lesson plans in Word or its
equivalent, which is like writing your code in notepad without any coding-
specific extensions._ "

There are plug-ins for Word that can produce quizzes, and most of the
interactive white-board software packages (each dedicated to a make of
interactive white-board) can import from Powerpoint or allow authoring of
interactive content. What I as a teacher _don't_ need is someone telling me to
use some huge IDE like package to build my lessons!

In the future I'd like to use a cheap tablet to scribe on and have what I'm
scribing (or what I have prepared earlier) just appear on the projector and on
the student tablets. I'd also like to be able to invite student A to 'show'
something to everyone else. Then I'd like to be able to roll the whole lesson
up and pop it somewhere like a Moodle course so the students can access the
stuff later for revision.

The original article addresses 'back end' student tracking and data capture
type software. More of a business application.

~~~
japhyr
I was talking about a different project that I would like to see happen, but
built using a similar development model. To be more specific, I'd like to see
a dedicated curriculum development tool built. I;d like it to be high-quality
and open source, so it can see widespread use in schools of every economic
level.

I am not envisioning a simple plugin to a word processing tool; I am imagining
a dedicated curriculum development tool that manages things like importing
standards, and connecting detailed parts of a learning plan to bigger-picture
summaries.

I in no way imagine such a tool being mandated for anyone; I simply imagine a
tool that is powerful enough that people will see it used well by experienced
teachers, and want to use it themselves.

~~~
keithpeter
" _I simply imagine a tool that is powerful enough that people will see it
used well by experienced teachers, and want to use it themselves._ "

Well, good luck, and if you have thought through the detail of this I would be
interested to see the specification (in the Spolsky sense) for the system you
envisage.

" _I in no way imagine such a tool being mandated for anyone_ "

Of course everyone will have to use it!

Edit: parent poster is also a teacher, so he must know that anything that is
_suggested_ by management as a central tool will immediately become mandatory!

~~~
japhyr
I am hoping to complete my MEd in December, and I want to complete an mvp of
an os ed tool as my masters project. I wrote a bit about the tool I envision
previously [1], and I recognize that the next step is writing a proper spec.
That will be part of the masters work.

Nice to see another teacher on here!

[1] [http://peak5390.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/why-do-
programmers-...](http://peak5390.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/why-do-programmers-
have-better-tools-than-educators/)

~~~
keithpeter
Good luck with the more detailed specification. I shall read it with interest.
In the UK we tend to have many small outcomes per lesson, and a second
document called a scheme of work tracks the large arc of a year's work.

------
ewams
" By taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source
tools, Saanich officials expect to develop openStudent for under $5 million,
with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million."

They estimate that using their old software would cost $100mm over ten years.
They're reducing that to roughly $15-20mm.

Government software is lovingly expensive. The state I live in spent over
$30mm to rebuild a purchasing application. And it doesn't even work!

Go figure.

~~~
gferrie
I am the Director of IT for the Saanich school district which has incubated
this project. There is a lot to say about how we got here but this is a
somewhat different project than most other open source student information
systems (and all commercial products that we are aware of).

Firstly it is build from the ground up to work as an enterprise system.
Meaning rather than just function for a district and its schools our system is
architected to function at the provincial or state / district / school level.

The system is designed to accommodate cross-enrolment between schools within a
district and between districts. As well it can accommodate continuous entry
(year round schools) and is built for conventional as well as distance
learning schools.

It is also has a sophisticated security model which considers users at the
enterprise level, district level, school level or any combination thereof. In
other words you can be a vice-principal at one school (with that view), a
teacher in the same school (with that view) and a parent with children in
another school district.

The system is also built to work in a distributed hosting model where the
primary can be at one site and secondarys at other sites. With the next
version of PostgresQL it will be possible to have multiple primaries.

There is so much that is different about this system from the standard SIS.
With its capacity to function at the enterprise system it could accommodate an
entire state or province.

Right now the system has been licensed under the Education Community Source
license (modified Apache 2) to ensure that we have better control of the code
but we are definitely looking for input and help into the system and it will
be available to other jurisdictions when it is complete. Have a look at the
documenation on our website and I will try and answer any questions or
comments relating the the system.

Thanks for all the supportive comments.

Gregg Ferrie

PS if you wonder why this has gotten this much support in a relatively small
school district we had already converted most of our servers and workstations
to Linux-based diskless clients (approximately 2500 in 18 schools). All of
teachers and students are used to using open source software including
LibreOffice, Scribus, The Gimp and many more.

------
patcon
Oh man, how awesome would it be if a high school CS class were able to have a
lesson where they learn how to contribute to an open source project that their
own school uses? So cool!

------
bdunbar
I hate to be Donald Downer but ... it's not done, yet.

' close to finishing the core version '

'expects to begin testing its openStudent software in elementary schools this
spring, with a full launch to follow in 2014. An advanced version for middle
and high schools is slated to roll out in 2015.'

~~~
d4vlx
True but I have a lot more faith in a tightly integrated 8 person team than
some off the shelf bloat-ware customization project.

~~~
bdunbar
As would I.

I don't assume they _are_ tightly integrated - all the article claims is
'eight people'.

These could be crack coders. Or they could be '1 guy who kinda knows VB and 7
people learning OJT'.

~~~
gferrie
Just to clarify our staff consists of myself (IT Director for the Saanich SD)
- I am the project lead/sponsor for the district. The eight people include:
project manager, product tester/quality assurance, stakeholder business
analyst and 5 strong Java programmers, including one developer who is one of
the original creators of the PostgresQL database.

gregg

~~~
bdunbar
Fascinating - thanks for the update.

------
jlc
I wonder if they considered throwing their lot in with Schooltool:

<http://www.schooltool.org>

It has been around a long while now, is in use around the world, and should at
least make a good starting point for further customization.

------
christiangenco
I can't even load the BCeSIS website through all of the Java security
warnings: <http://www.bcesis.isw-bc.ca/>

------
kozikow
We have something like this for years in Poland and it works very well:
<http://usos.edu.pl/about-usos>

------
siliconc0w
There is where the federal government I think can help and step in to provide
a hosted open source education system (wit a local appliance for caching and
to survive outages). Not just for student registration and grades, but US-wide
shared lesson plans, shared success stories, realtime metrics and for parents,
etc.

------
rayditutto
it's open? where's the code?

~~~
gferrie
As our funding is completely from the school district we currently have the
code on our internal Git. The code itself is based on the Education Community
Source license primarily so we can keep the development relevant to British
Columbia. Once we have completed the product we intent to release the code to
be forked by other jurisdictions to modify for their own purposes.

Please feel free to have a look at the openStudent website for documentation
about the system and please ask any and all questions.

gregg

