By Diane Campbell
A new software program adopted by the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board has proven to be a nightmare for the 13 secondary schools involved in its trial run.
“When we put the system under full load in September, it was intolerable,” says John Hindle, senior consultant of business and learning technology at the school board.
The new program, called the Trillium Student Information Management System, faced a flurry of problems within its first two days of use, including slow speed, inaccuracies in student registration and constant system crashes. Many administrators found themselves working overtime in order to rectify the problem.
The board, along with several others throughout the province, introduced the Trillium system in September to 13 secondary schools — at a reported cost of $2,500 per school — as an updated, Y2K-compliant program designed to cover a variety of needs not available in the old systems. It was also supposed to be less expensive.
Trillium, developed by the Ministry of Education but now controlled by a private company, was designed primarily to store student records more efficiently as they move through the school system.
Trillium’s other function was to file and sort high school students’ course choices for the upcoming school year and create their timetables.
Unfortunately, the system didn’t work the way it was supposed to and the schools have since gone back to their old software — a Y2K-compliant version of the Quinte program.
Of the deciding factors affecting the board’s decision to go back to Quinte, Hindle says one of the biggest ones had to do with the safety of student information, such as medical records.
“When you’re dealing with safety in schools, you can’t have a system that’s less than perfect,” he says.
No student information was lost because of Trillium’s failings, but information has had to be re-entered into school systems by administrators.
“We could have done more testing in a perfect world … but this isn’t a perfect world,” says Maggie Melenhorst, manager of communications for the school board.
This begs the question of why more testing was not done on the system before it was adopted in September.
Dan Cousineau, manager of business and learning technology for the board, says because of the Ministry of Education’s disorganization and last-minute changes, there were applications missing from Trillium’s system, which prevented its completion, and proper testing.
“It’s very frustrating for school boards, when the Ministry changes things at the last minute,” he says. “They all scramble at this time of year.”
Hindle says attempts were made to assess the program’s success with other school boards, but adds, “When you’re going between school boards, it’s almost impossible to actually compare.”
Melenhorst adds the board may request a proposal in the new year for an educational database “that would address all of our needs in all of our schools.”