Idahoans got more discouraging news about their government this week in a state report showing that about $40 million in tax dollars were wasted on an instructional management system.
Schoolnet was brought to us by former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna as part of his ill-fated Students Come First initiative.
The system was meant to provide every school in Idaho with the same system to track things like grades and attendance, but the vast majority of Idaho’s public school districts never used it.
The report regarding Schoolnet from the Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations also mentioned that a $21 million grant from the J.A. & Kathryn Albertson Foundation was sunk into the program, but to no avail.
Rakesh Mohan, director of the Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations, was quoted in the Spokesman-Review as saying: “Poor management, poor decisions and poor system functionality compounded themselves, and prevented the goals for a statewide instructional management system from being realized.”
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are outraged about how a total of $61 million could have been squandered by our state on a computer system that does not even work.
This legislative session has made it clear how hesitant our Legislature is to spend funds even on badly needed things such as education, roads and bridges.
The millions of dollars wasted on Schoolnet could have gone a long way toward building schools and improving our roads.
The one big question we have is how this colossal waste of funds could have occurred?
Was Luna simply given the state’s checkbook to pursue any shiny object that ventured across his line of sight?
There has been a lot of news in recent months that has made our state government look like it’s as wasteful and incompetent as our federal government.
Idaho stuck with Corrections Corporation of America until the lawsuits and news reports painted such an embarrassing and sadistic picture of the company running the state’s maximum security prison that we had to change horses.
Then there was the broadband contract fiasco that also landed our state in court, and showed our state government isn’t even capable of providing our schools with Internet.
And now there’s the news about the wasted
$61 million on Schoolnet.
Are there any Idahoans left who have faith in their state government? We must wonder.
Idaho voters in 2012 were the voice of reason in nixing all of Luna’s Students Come First initiatives in a statewide referendum. Lawmakers responded by trying to continue to push through legislation reviving some of Luna’s plans, and Schoolnet somehow missed any scrutiny until now.
Even on the federal level, a $61 million screw-up like this would result in congressional hearings.
We would encourage our lawmakers to bring Luna in for some public questioning on a waste of money that the Office of Performance Evaluations said could have been avoided. It would also be nice to see the Idaho Attorney General’s Office get involved.
Allowing Luna’s lunacy in regard to Schoolnet to go unpunished is simply unacceptable.
It’s too bad Idaho voters couldn’t have cast a vote on Schoolnet like we all did on Luna’s other poorly conceived ideas.
Even on the technology front, Luna managed to take us from bad to worse. We won’t even get into how Idaho is now a last resort for educators looking for work.
Let’s all hope with Schoolnet that Luna’s legacy has finally run its course.
After all, how many multimillion dollar mistakes can one state stomach?