QUESTION: The State of NC has been playing around with NC Wise now for what, 4 or 5 years? When the state fired IBM because they could not make the system work--NC had already paid them $240 Million. That was a couple of years ago. The NC Wise system still is not working right--how much, in total, has NC paid for this thing so far?
— Joseph L. Shepard, Spring Lake

ANSWER: The total cost of the program is estimated to be $253.9 million from the initial pilot phase to complete implementation in all school districts, schools and public charter schools, according to the N.C. Department of Public Instruction (DPI).

Vanessa Jeter, communications director for DPI, provided the following information about the program:

It is important to recognize that through the NC WISE project, North Carolina local school districts and NC DPI access the data required to leverage approximately $10 billion in local, state and federal dollars for preK - grade 12 education.

NC WISE is North Carolina's system for collecting student, teacher and school information and using that information to make educational decisions in our school districts. NC WISE is replacing SIMS, a system that is more than 20 years old and no longer able to be run on modern computer equipment.

NC WISE deployment began in October 2004, but pilot testing of the program occurred in seven representative school districts for several years prior to that. Today, NC WISE is serving 66 percent of the state's 115 school districts and public charter schools and is on track to serve all districts and all 1.4 million current students by the end of the 2008-2009 school year.

Over the development and deployment years, NC WISE users have become more satisfied with the system, giving the system a 91 percent satisfaction rating as measured by a November 2007 survey.

Deployment continues at a brisk pace. Within just the past 60 days NC WISE has added 29 new districts with more than 400 schools (including charter schools) and serving more than 250,000 new students.

Implementing a project of this scale is a complex process, and there have been bumps in the road along the way, as anyone involved in such a large-scale project would expect.

Nonetheless, over the past two years, since the NC Department of Public Instruction took primary control of the project, we have successfully completed Wave 2 deployment, significantly increased customer services (training, data, and support), and completed a major software infrastructure upgrade. These activities have been completed while reducing per student costs of the project.

The NC WISE Web site is a great ongoing resource of information about this project.
— Kelly