School District 47 officials are continuing to look at the possibility of supporting a student database system being built in Saanich to replace the current system provided by the government.
Secretary treasurer Steve Hopkins informed the Powell River Board of Education, at its April meeting, that the district has taken “a high level look” at the program for tracking student registrations, attendance, grades and other records. “The comments have been quite positive so far,” he said.
School District 63 (Saanich) sent letters out to all school districts in the province in January looking for support to locally produce and host an enterprise student information system called openStudent. This system would replace the government provided program called British Columbia Enterprise Student Information System (BCeSIS), which will no longer be supported in two years. The ministry of education is currently looking for another enterprise database system to replace the current one, and has not put its support behind the Saanich project.
BCeSIS was set up in 2005 and cost the province $16 million to develop and about $11 million per year to operate and maintain, according to published information. The Saanich system is estimated to have half the operating costs of the current system.
Trustee Steve Formosa said he hoped the Saanich system will work out because BCeSIS “has been disappointing for any teachers who have had to use it. It’s a difficult piece of software to work with and if this is going to come from teachers and administrators I’m hopeful it will help our staff if we can get involved with it.”
Two BC school districts, Comox Valley and Vancouver Island North, have agreed to invest in the openStudent project before the system is completed. Saanich plans on rolling out the elementary school portion of the program for use in September 2013.
“Right now we’re just waiting for the elementary portion to role out to further evaluate it,” said Formosa, “but our preliminary look at it is that there are some intriguing aspects to being involved with the project.”
If the district commits investment funds it will be given more of a shareholder role in its development, said Hopkins.
“At least with this you know where it’s going,” he added, “but with the government’s [program] no one knows what it looks like yet.”
