We got back to Thunder Bay, and I got back to work. Things were in turmoil. The Ministry of Education was at war with itself! My program is called Managing Information for Student Achievement (MISA), and as part of the plan to achieve this, Ontario Student Information System (OnSIS) has been set up. Well, OnSIS has determined to revamp the school reporting system and move to solely-electronic reporting. There are three main reports each school year: October, March and June. For the school year 2005-06, OnSIS decided that October would be done twice (once the old way, and then again the new electronic way-as a training program), then everyone would be ready to do March and June electronically only. Now you might suppose (well I would anyway) that to accomplish such a plan there would be an electronic reporting system in place. You might further suppose that it would be tested and have the bugs worked out of it before the plan was executed. But you would be wrong—this was a build-as-you-go strategy that soon turned into a catch-up-as-soon-as-possible plan! So... along about February OnSIS finally announced that the October reports could be begin! Except that, of course, they couldn't; the reporting system was now in place, but it didn't work! Soon, we were ordered to do March Reporting the old fashioned way, and that we would all catch up as soon as possible (and that is seldom soon, in case you haven't noticed it.) Okay fine, we thought, we can all be flexible while this works through. But we were wrong! OnSIS was in no mood to be flexible! Just because their application was not working was no reason to miss the scheduled reporting dates.
The MISA year ended on March 31st, and I prepared my reports on year one, and made my budget proposal for year two. Since year two funding was supposed to begin on April 1st, they promised a quick turn around (Government has a slightly different interpretation of 'quick turnaround' than I do.), and that we should have our budget approval in June and our money flowing by the end of August. What a nice coincidence, just when we get back from Zambia! Ah, but not so fast there Charlie. OnSIS has decided that we MISA types need to pay more attention to their problems. The monkey wrench is in the works. We will get no money; we won't even find out about our budgets until we develop a plan as to how we're going to catch up with the OnSIS reporting needs. Never mind that we've been without funding since April 1st, we can continue to starve in the dark until we come up with a plan. Never mind that my schools cover 1500 km and some are fly-in, I must get properly signed and authorized plans from each one of them detailing when they will get caught up on last year's reports.
Welcome back to Canada! "This is Africa" used to be my watch word; I see it applies more generally than I had thought.
The MISA year ended on March 31st, and I prepared my reports on year one, and made my budget proposal for year two. Since year two funding was supposed to begin on April 1st, they promised a quick turn around (Government has a slightly different interpretation of 'quick turnaround' than I do.), and that we should have our budget approval in June and our money flowing by the end of August. What a nice coincidence, just when we get back from Zambia! Ah, but not so fast there Charlie. OnSIS has decided that we MISA types need to pay more attention to their problems. The monkey wrench is in the works. We will get no money; we won't even find out about our budgets until we develop a plan as to how we're going to catch up with the OnSIS reporting needs. Never mind that we've been without funding since April 1st, we can continue to starve in the dark until we come up with a plan. Never mind that my schools cover 1500 km and some are fly-in, I must get properly signed and authorized plans from each one of them detailing when they will get caught up on last year's reports.
Welcome back to Canada! "This is Africa" used to be my watch word; I see it applies more generally than I had thought.
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