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Board debates $145,000 ALEKS high-school math renewal amid concerns over multiple platforms and data
Summary
District curriculum staff recommended renewing ALEKS for high-school math at $145,000 for a year (or $123,000 to end July), while board members warned overlapping digital programs, inconsistent rollout, and syncing/data issues risked wasted spending and teacher workload.
Montgomery County Board of Education members spent an extended portion of their Nov. 12 meeting questioning a proposed renewal of ALEKS, an adaptive high-school math platform. Doctor Shanice Woods, the district’s curriculum lead, told the board that a one-year subscription is priced at $145,000 (a shorter contract through July would be $123,000) and that 86% of responding high-school math teachers surveyed said they would like to continue using ALEKS.
"The quote for 1 year subscription is $145,000," Doctor Woods said during her presentation, and she described ALEKS as a universal screener and adaptive learning path used in grades 9–12. Woods warned that discontinuing ALEKS midyear would leave the district without a comparable balanced assessment for high-school math and could ‘flush’ students’ beginning-of-year data if the platform changed.
Board members raised several concerns. One board member (identified in the transcript as Speaker 11) said the district’s patchwork of digital resources and incomplete rollout risked wasting money and teacher time: "Everything that these kids have done from the beginning of the year would be flushed," the member said, urging caution before abandoning a tool already in teacher use. Other members pressed for clearer performance data, fuller teacher and student participation metrics, evidence of fidelity and teacher training, and for a vendor sync with PowerSchool.
Woods acknowledged implementation gaps: not all schools were using ALEKS, some teachers had not yet been trained, and data-sync questions remain. She recommended a program-audit approach and emphasized the district uses Clever for single sign-on now, while a PowerSchool sync would be a separate technical project.
Multiple board members called for a summer program and vendor-audit process to reduce overlap among digital resources, to set district-wide expectations and to collect the usage and outcome data necessary to determine whether the $145,000 renewal is the best investment.
The board did not record a final vote on the ALEKS renewal during the session; Woods said the district could request another quote or consider a phased renewal while central office completes a program audit.
