That's ridiculous. When we had first converted to electronic medical records the original version of the software didn't allow for printing if paper copies were needed such as for patient requests. You know how they worked around that? Screen shot and print. Cheap, easy, not particularly time consuming.

Heh, the discovery for the lawsuit should be interesting.

It's entirely possible that the estimate is correct, because the software is garbage. 'Why would you want that information?' I've had vendor's say...

Which leads me to wonder if the software is written specifically to anonymize, and randomize the data for aggregation amongst the states sharing it... and they would have to undo that to get the data for an individual.

At which point they should just give the data definition and requirements to the parent to say what things will be pulled in...

But, no. Bureaucratic pricing to keep the rif-raff out...

While I believe the man is totally justified, I wonder who potentially cares about a kid's "permanent record" in school?

I know my former employer verified my college degree and citizenship. I know the government verified my citizenship before issuing a passport, and I know the county verified my military service before giving me a veteran's exemption on part of my property taxes. Nobody ever asked about any details, as long as the proper box could be checked. Dad was right when he told me "Nobody cares where you went to school after you get your first job."

So. Is this another case of wanting to have it both ways?

If the data was anonymized, protecting ID theft of a student and thus protecting his or her adult life, this is what it would require to extract individual data.

I am certain that if this data was easily available, the outcry about the surveillance of our children would be deafening.

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Just for comparison, the guy wearing a fresh-air-fed plastic suit handling radioactive material at SRS is making $32/hour.

Perhaps the SAIN guys don't themselves associate particular data sets with particular students, but at some point there must be validation checks to ensure not only that all data for all students was entered, but to ensure the data sets are unique. To do this, there *must* be a mechanism for linking a data set to a student. If this doesn't happen, the entire system is unreliable, it renders it virtually worthless. Without such checks, who's to say someone didn't enter the future valedictorian's data set in several times to skew the results?

As to the $10K cost, that should be only a one time charge - once the code is changed, it's done. It's then only a matter of invoking the routine to spit out a report based on the identifier. A $20 to $25 fee ought to easily cover a data set request.

Google "SAIN Data Dictionary - Nevada Department of Education" to find a PDF of what's in a data set.

At the applicable wage rate of $84.95/hour, the requested work resulted in a $10,194 price tag.

Lets call $84.95 as $59.46 as the wage paid to the employee. (Knocking off 30% for bennies.) That means the programmer is getting an annual salary of $123,677.

For that kind of money they should have been thinking ahead and have already built the reports. I bet they are already written because some manager has wanted to see it already. So it is complete bullshit and they are trying to block this guy and anybody else by using money as an obstacle.

If the purpose is to collect data about students so that it can be shared, then there must be a way to share the data. There is no way they DON'T have a method for checking what data is collecting and viewing it.

This is absolute bullshit and they just don't want to turn over the records to some guy who has been a strong dissenter, probably because he'll see something he doesn't think they should have recorded and publicize that data, causing more bad press for them.

Don't put your kids in public school.

Welcome to the world of public records requests. Reporters and editors deal with this every day.

Yes, it's a waste of money, and yes, it's designed to keep the public from public records.

I have a hunch that kids will be delighted about this - maybe.

http://www.doe.nv.gov/DataCenter/DataDictionary04292014/

I notice the date is 4/29. I don't know if this means it was posted after this came up.

But what it shows is that it wouldn't be hard at all to pull the information for a student.

Let's see...

Phone_Number Pupil telephone number
..
Student Number Student's district identification number.

Gee. Damn, that would be a hard query.

Gee. Damn, that would be a hard query. -- Unix-Jedi at May 18, 2014 12:16 PM

Seeing the spec -- that would probably take me two days just because I'm not familiar with all the tables and structures.

Three weeks is a blatant lie.

I have not looked at the spec..the link above just spins.

Based on the project I am currently involved with (and not knowing anything about their db schema) 120 hours sounds completely reasonable. My team has been brought in to make some reports for management and the db was not designed to be used in this way. For example, for most of the data the date the task was done is irrelevant. One of most important reports is time based - # tasks completed each week and how many were scheduled to be done. Our most recent problem is we discovered that tasks are "tagged" for which week they are going to be done in so we could do the something like "where tag_name like '2014%'" but if instead of entering all the tags through the tag editor the user just typed (or copy/paste/edit) the value is stored in a different spot as a string. And of course this has to fit into their reporting system ... if we could write software for it I think it would be easy.

It should be a one time cost.

"It's entirely possible that the estimate is correct, because the software is garbage. 'Why would you want that information?' I've had vendor's say..."

I think it's total bullshit. It takes all of ten seconds to write a SQL query to select all rows matching the student's ID number. Print whatever comes out, and you're done. No, it may not be pretty-formatted, but so what. Besides, I can guarantee you that they do in fact have a pretty-format query available, because they probably use it every day internally.

Does Nevada have a state Freedom of Information Act? It would be really interesting to put in an FOIA request for all of the system's source code.

Depends on how its written and what government spec/standard they used. There may be very specific multi layer data obfuscation. Ive seen it don on DB because one programer was talented but an ass hole and the bureaucrat boss was a buddy hire.
If the target of the DB was aggregate data then individual data may not have been tested on release. Also as privacy laws shift there are usually patches put in. Patch on patch layouts became very ugly. I've dealt with this in medical software. There may have been a partial rewrite once the school added WIFI which is required by some standards. The rather odd illusion that wifi is anymore or less hackable than hardlines is the reason.
Then you have the joy of multi level admin which if done at the last minute will redefine cluster ____.

Not saying that this isn't the system making life difficult for a dissenter but if this was built by bureaucracy the numbers are well within what is expected. In all honesty they sound kind of low.