Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Education School Finance topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Colorado Department of Education seeks $3 million to begin modernization of decade-old school finance system
Summary
The Colorado Department of Education told the Joint Technology Committee it needs an estimated $5–9 million over two to three years to modernize its outdated school finance system; the department requested $3 million in initial general funds for fiscal year 2025–26 and described planned next steps including an RFP process.
Sheldon Rosenkrantz, chief district operations officer for the Colorado Department of Education, told the Joint Technology Committee that the agency is seeking to modernize a school finance system more than a decade old that supports monthly school finance distributions and annual transportation funding.
Rosenkrantz said the current system is used to determine monthly distributions of about $9,700,000,000 and annual transportation funding of about $71,800,000 and that many components became unstable after a 2019 change to the full‑day kindergarten funding factor. "Many of the components of the system are entirely nonoperational, forcing CDE to manage over $9,000,000,000 in school funding manually," Rosenkrantz said.
The department reported it contracted in 2024 for a feasibility study and alternative analysis. The alternatives considered included maintaining the status quo, modernizing the existing system, a modular approach, a custom build and a hybrid model; the department recommended a modified off‑the‑shelf (MOTS) solution. Rosenkrantz said the alternative analysis estimates the MOTS approach will cost between $5,000,000 and $9,000,000 over two to three years. "We chose the modified off the shelf technology solution," he said.
CDE is requesting $3,000,000 in general funds for fiscal year 2025–26 and anticipates up to $6,000,000 may be needed in a following fiscal year for implementation and modules, with additional ongoing licensing, hosting and maintenance costs to be defined after an RFP and further cost refinement. Rosenkrantz said the department is conducting requests for information and will publish an RFP after narrowing vendor candidates.
Committee members asked about whether the new system would improve the accuracy and timeliness of school finance forecasts and whether it would integrate with existing state data pipelines. Rosenkrantz said the planned system would connect to the state's data pipeline to reduce manual data transfers and improve turnaround time and accuracy. "This system would actually work with our data pipeline system and pull information from that," he said.
Lawmakers and staff discussed the need for modular flexibility to respond to legislative changes in formula inputs and said an MOTS solution was chosen in part to allow for quicker recoding of modules. Rosenkrantz said some modules could be operational as soon as the next year depending on vendor responses and that full operation of the larger set of modules could take up to two years from funding and RFP award.
The committee staff noted this request was submitted as a late IT capital request and that the Office of State Planning and Budgeting ranked the project seventh among state‑funded IT capital projects on its January list. The committee did not take a funding vote; members said they will include the request in the committee's prioritization list that the Joint Budget Committee will consider.
