Frustrated by the lack of a computer program that can adequately track academic strengths and weaknesses of students, the Bayfield and Durango school districts have embarked on an effort to create their own.

The desire to give teachers the tools they need to better track students is behind more than a year’s work on the computer program, called School Vault, said Bayfield Superintendent Troy Zabel

This week, the Bayfield school board approved an additional $20,000 for continued program development, bringing the district’s total contribution to $70,000.

“We need to keep the progress going,” Zabel said. It represents “a lot of hard work by a lot of people over the last year and a half.”

The district, Zabel said, otherwise pays a per-pupil fee, a total of around $19,000 per year at $15 per student, to use existing inadequate computer programs in an effort to track how students are doing.

“We are being very thoughtful of how we roll this out. I think it’s the right direction to be going,” he said. “I think I was hired to get (teacher) professional learning communities going. I see teachers struggle because we don’t give them the tools to do what we ask them to do.”

Bayfield school board members got a presentation about School Vault from third-grade teacher Jen Rector and Durango School District Director of Student Achievement Christy Bloomquist.

In April, Zabel told board members the Durango and Bayfield school districts are working with a software company to commercialize their creation for sale to other school districts.

“We feel it’s very unique,” he said.

The two districts will maintain ownership of the software code up to when the private company starts work on it, probably in July.

The districts have determined they can’t commercialize the program on their own without a private company, he said.

“If the company is going in a direction we don’t want, we’d be able to say we want to own the program to this point, to take it in a different direction, and there wouldn’t be any cost to the district. We would own the code,” he said.

The private company is gathering money to continue development, Zabel said. As the private firm starts earning money, there will be money coming back and a profit-sharing to the districts, he said. Other districts will pay a per-student fee each year to use the program.

A lot of districts are interested, he said. Zabel made presentations on School Vault to other Western Slope schools during April, and he has other meetings scheduled with other school officials.

“There’s interest outside our state,” he said. “We’ve been working with Kentucky and Louisiana. We’re sending information to the University of Washington.” The presentations are “to show people where we’re headed with it.”