A Vancouver Island school district has had the door slammed shut on a project designed to provide an alternative system for tracking student information.
The Saanich Board of Education released a statement and said that its project “was not only innovative, but provided a practical alternative at a time of fiscal restraint in our education system and in the province.”
The board voted to cease funding the project after the school district was informed by the provincial government that any new information system must be able to integrate with the new BC Service Card. This is a change that would add millions of dollars to developing the software.
The school district has spent the last two years working on developing a software package, called openStudent, which could be used to replace the current student information system, British Columbia Electronic Student Information System (BCeSIS), when it is mothballed next year.
School District 47 had been watching development of openStudent closely as it would ultimately need to decide whether to support the database.
Last year the BC ministry of education signed an agreement with an American commercial vendor to provide the software and server space to replace BCeSiS, called ConnectEDBC.
According to the Saanich board’s media release, the school district continued developing its project “using local capital funds thinking that a BC non-profit solution would be much less costly and more suited to the real educational needs of BC schools.”
