While most of the attention regarding the reopening of Vancouver schools yesterday focused on the impact of job action by teachers, a greater impact could be felt if upgrades to a controversial computer software system didnt work out as well as hoped.
Last year, the British Columbia Enterprise Student Information System, better known as BCeSIS, suffered a system-wide malfunction that caused widespread chaos during the first week of school.
The Vancouver School Boards Vision Vancouver chair, Patti Bacchus, said her fingers are crossed the bugs have been worked out in time for this years opening.
Its one of the things that we are holding our breath over and one of the biggest concerns, said Bacchus. Its the computer system used for student information, time tabling, marks, all kinds of things, and is used by most school districts in the province. It failed last year and pretty well crashed, creating incredible stress and additional work. Weve heard from the Ministry of Education that work has been done to hopefully eliminate that, but everybody signs on that first week and, as you can imagine, it is heavy, heavy traffic on the system. It created a lot of frustration getting everybody settled into schools, students registered into classes and making sure all the information was correct.
B.C. is one of the only jurisdictions in North America to have a system-wide student data computer system, which has been a lightning rod for controversy since the Ministry of Education first introduced it to Vancouver schools in 2008. While used primarily to keep track of student attendance and marks, it can also be used to record behaviour problems, medical conditions, court records, custody orders and other sensitive material. It also allows teachers to write comments about students that could follow them throughout their school career and even after graduating. Many teachers are highly critical of software they describe as being unreliable, archaic and too expensive. (Schools are required to pay an annual licensing fee of $10 per student, which in Vancouver works out to more than $550,000 a year.) Although optional, 56 of 60 B.C. public-school districts are now reliant on the system.
Superintendent Steve Cardwell said he is optimistic that the new BCeSIS system will run more smoothly after a very tough year and that IT specialists will have solved the problems.
Were given to understand that the Ministry of Education has worked hard with the people who look after the software to ensure it will function properly this year, said Cardwell. Theyve done a lot of testing and made some changes to the application itself. They say they are very confident it will work this year. Hopefully it will because as a large school district, we really depend on it. So many things we do now depend on technology, and these are mission critical systems.
It is even more critical that the software is working properly this year because teachers themselves, as part of the job action, wont be entering data into BCeSIS, and the task will fall entirely to administrative staff.
Andrew Fleming
Twitter: @flematic
