The department — headed by a nonpartisan, elected officer who serves a four-year term — serves all public school children and several specialized schools across the state. While the department works with 58 county offices and more than 1,000 districts, and a total of 6.2 million students, the department is not responsible for most of the technology purchased and used at the local level.
However, the department is responsible for implementing educational policies set by the state Board of Education.
Overall, the state budgets $92.5 billion for K-12 education programs, with $381 million of that spent for state operations.
"People think, 'Wow, K-12 education, you have billions and billions of dollars.' We do, but most of that money, it goes to county offices, districts and schools. For state operations, we get very, very little," Matsuo said.
The department staff at the state level is responsible for maintaining multiple systems, including the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CalPADS), the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), the CA Schools app and the state Department of Education website. These systems include more than 500,000 simultaneous test takers, 7 TB of student data and about 30,000 Web pages.
In order to do business with the department, vendors need to keep a few things in mind, according to Matsuo and his team, who accompanied him to Wednesday's briefing and helped field questions from attendees.
Those are:
- Show what you can do in our environment
- Offer professional services
- Know how functionality can overlap, and do not double up
"We don't wed ourselves to old technology," Matsuo said. "We don't like to stay with a solution that isn't meeting our business needs."
