CTB McGraw Hill Purchase Orders

How much have we spent with CTB/McGraw Hill?

Readingtonparents.org has received and analyzed a request under the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) for information on the funds allocated for test-vendor CTB/McGraw Hill for this school year.

Prior to the October 13 Family School Council meeting on Standardized testing, readingtonparents.org submitted a list of questions, including: what is the amount of money on purchase orders to CTB/McGraw Hill for this school year? The question was never answered directly, although Assistant Superintendent Joan Matula did say that it "works out to about $15.00 per student". With about 2200 students in the district, that would add up to about $33.000.00. We suspected that figure to be low.

The OPRA request submitted on October 26 was specifically for an:

"Itemized vendor history listing of purchase orders and expenditures for CTB/McGraw Hill from January 2003 to the present"

What we actually received was an Account Totals report with a start date of 7/1/2004 and an end date of 6/30/2005. Therefore, any purchase orders issued and already paid from January 2003 to July 2004 would not show on this report, even though our OPRA request included part of that prior year. The purchase orders were also not itemized, as requested. Still, the data that was included is telling.

In Fund 11-000-218-600-000-000, "Reg Stu Support-Supplies", there are four purchase orders to CTB/McGraw Hill:

PO	*Date*	*Description*	*Amount*
400597	6/25/04	04-05 Assessments	29692.30
508011	10/01/04	Level 10 Gr 1 Assessments	1924.35
508018	10/08/04	Gr 1 / 2 Assessment Scoring	6020.51
508019	10/11/04	Gr 5 / 7 Assessment Scoring	10364.14

The total amount on purchase orders to CTB/McGraw Hill included in the report supplied, then, is $48,001.30. That is fifteen thousand more than Ms. Matula estimated on October 13, which was two days after the last purchase order was issued. Of course, they may be purchase orders in the prior year that were already paid and therefore did not show on this report, and there may be purchase orders to CTB/McGraw Hill planned for later in this year. We do not know.

What we do know is that this information, like a lot of information protected by the Superintendent's office, had to be pried from their hands as you would pry a bottle of Thunderbird wine from the corner drunk. It was not forthcoming.