JA_Gradespeed_Redacted.pdf

JUSTIFICATION FOR OTHER THAN FULL AND

OPEN COMPETITION

Page 1 of 6 Pages

Upon the basis of the following justification, I, as Contracting Officer, hereby approve the use of other than full and open competition of the proposed contractual action pursuant to the authority of FAR 13.501(a)(1)(ii), a sole source acquisition in accordance with 41 U.S.C. 1901.

1. REQUIRING AGENCY AND CONTRACTING OFFICE: Department of Defense

Education Activity (DoDEA), Education Division, 4800 Mark Center Drive, Alexandria, Virginia 22350.

2. NATURE/DESCRIPTION OF ACTION(S):

DoDEA intends to award a firm-fixed-price contract on a sole source basis to Powerschool

Group LLC. Powerschool Group is the sole provider of Gradespeed licenses and support. The contract will cover a 12-month base period, effective 12 January 2018 to 11 January 2019, and two 12-month option periods: 12 January 2019 to 11 January 2020 and 12 January 2020 to 11

January 2021.

3. DESCRIPTION OF SUPPLIES/SERVICES REQUIRED TO MEET AGENCY’S NEEDS:

DoDEA requires licenses and maintenance and support of a vendor-hosted online electronic gradebook that allows teachers in elementary and secondary schools to enter grades and other progress marks for students. Teachers must also be able to use the electronic gradebook to print student Progress Reports. The online electronic gradebook must have the capability to transfer grading and attendance data efficiently from the vendor-hosted system to DoDEA’s internally hosted Aspen Student Information System (SIS) on defined schedules. Teachers require a gradebook that can ensure continuity of grading and reporting practices currently in place at

DoDEA.

In terms of what teachers must be able to use the gradebook to track to meet DoDEA’s needs, the electronic gradebook must provide capabilities for teachers to manage attendance, behavior, lesson plans, rubrics, grade-weighting, roster filtering and general organization capabilities.

DoDEA teachers must maintain such gradebooks across the multiple classes they may teach.

The gradebook system also must allow DoDEA enterprise systems administrators to maintain the system at a district/state level, and configure security settings, school configuration settings, data transfer settings, email template settings and provide per-school logging for import/export.

Furthermore, the gradebook must have the capability to provide information and reports for traditional system auditing. Configuration parameters are required to be maintained at the enterprise (state or district) level with the capability to designate school level administrators to have delegated permissions/authority over their own school settings.

The electronic gradebook must also contain a separate portal site and text-messaging module that is accessible to parents and students from outside of DoDEA’s network. The portal site needs to display student grades and progress reports to parents and students. The system shall allow user

Page 2 of 6 Pages accounts to be managed in distributed fashion by each school’s designated systems administrator, and shall include the capability of configuring system and user account settings at a school and district (enterprise) level.

Finally, as addressed in the Market Research section below, the electronic gradebook must not require any additional user training or job-aides in order for teachers and support staff to configure, manage or use the system.

This requirement consists of licenses, maintenance and support for approximately 6,500 staff users (teachers) that will be leveraging the gradebook capabilities, and 80,000 students

(including parents) that will be leveraging the text-messaging module and portal capabilities.

Licenses, maintenance and support are paid at the start of the performance period once invoice is received from contractor.

4. IDENTIFICATION OF STATUTORY AUTHORITY:

FAR 13.501(a)(1)(ii), a sole source acquisition under the authority of the procedures in FAR subpart 13.5 were used in accordance with 41 U.S.C. Section 1901. The basis for the need to procure an electronic gradebook on a sole source basis is that the requirement is available from only one responsible source, and no other source can satisfy the needs of the Government.

5. DEMONSTRATION OF CONTRACTOR’S UNIQUE QUALIFICATIONS:

The only source that can currently meet DoDEA’s needs for an electronic gradebook is the

Gradespeed product that Powerschool Group LLC, cage code 7L4D7, (Powerschool) can supply.

Rationale: DoDEA is currently using Powerschool Gradespeed, and is addressed in more detail in

Section 9, Other Supporting Facts, has had setbacks in trying to transition to using the gradebook in older versions of the Aspen SIS. DoDEA therefore requires continued services of Powerschool

Gradespeed teacher gradebook, parent portal and text-messaging module to maintain grade reporting consistency system wide. Contract HE1254-17-P-0002 for Gradespeed expires January 11, 2018.

Without continuity of services provided by the Gradespeed gradebook, teachers would be overly burdened to develop their own stand-alone computer or paper-pencil grading solutions, which would be an enormous backward step in providing equitable enterprise SIS and electronic gradebook services.

DoDEA has already begun planning the transition of gradebook services into the latest version of the Aspen SIS and parent portal, which are available at no additional cost to the Government under the existing Aspen contract. The intent of this approach is to consolidate gradebook services into the Aspen SIS to promote better competition and ease transitioning efforts to a new

SIS in future years. Initial testing, training, and piloting activities are scheduled to take place between January and December of 2018. Full implementation is scheduled for the 2019-2020 school year. The performance periods identified by this acquisition are required to provide sufficient overlap to identify requirements, plan the transitioning, coordinate with teacher

Page 3 of 6 Pages associations, test functionality, develop training/professional development, pilot, implement, and support issues that may arise post implementation.

This sole source requirement is to ensure there is no break in service of the Gradespeed products by transitioning to Aspen gradebook during the migration, beta testing, training and production implementation phases. PowerSchool Group LLC, is the sole provider of Gradespeed licenses and maintenance.

6. EFFORTS MADE TO PROMOTE COMPETITION: DoDEA has performed market research activities to identify alternate sources of the GradeSpeed product to no avail. DoDEA will also synopsize the proposed contract action on FebBizOpps.gov.

7. DETERMINATION OF FAIR AND REASONABLE COST: The contracting officer has determined that the anticipated cost to the Government will be fair and reasonable.

8. MARKET RESEARCH:

Market research was conducted for potential replacements of the organization’s current electronic gradebook to determine the breadth and scope of electronic gradebook service offerings. Methods used for market research included historical acquisition information review from prior industry day SIS acquisition efforts, search of available fbo.gov archives and current opportunities, and a review of internet sources, some of which included live demonstrations.

Requirements for this acquisition effort were updated from the set of requirements originally written as part of DoDEA’s 2015 SIS acquisition.

The need for a solution that does not impose upon teacher classroom time also limits the types of products that would work for DoDEA teachers. More specifically, in performing market research, DoDEA considered the unavailability of staff/teacher training days for the 2017/18 and

2018/19 school years. As a result, DoDEA was required to include a provision that all potential replacements must be usable “out-of-the-box” without any user or administrator training, which placed a significant constraint on projected implementation timelines.

DoDEA has reviewed information from vendors including Powerschool, Skyward, Infinite

Campus, Tyler, Follett, ThinkWave, McGraw Hill, Schoology, and Rediker, and has ascertained that trends for enterprise-level electronic gradebooks in recent years has been to incorporate them as a component of more comprehensive service offerings including enterprise student information systems and learning management systems. While that may be beneficial to the overall management of enterprise student master data, those larger systems provide services outside the scope of this requirement, and increase the complexity of those respective implementations.

DoDEA has also identified standalone electronic gradebooks providing “free-to-use” tools both for teachers and individual schools. Services like LearnBoost, JumpRope, and MyGradeBook provide core gradebook features, but do not include tools to allow the administration of these systems from a district or state level, much like DoDEA requires.

Page 4 of 6 Pages

Both Schoology and Follett’s Aspen SIS are currently being used by DoDEA staff, and provide many features that position them as candidates to replace the organization’s current GradeSpeed gradebook, with one major caveat: neither Aspen nor Schoology are being leveraged heavily for their gradebook capabilities. In order to consider transitioning gradebook services to either system, changes to architecture, baseline configurations, along with full staff retraining are required. As previously stated, availability of training days for staff plays a constraining role in the development of implementation timeline to obtain full adoption.

Market research has ultimately concluded that most replacements meeting technical requirements still cannot meet time and training availability constraints posed by other organization initiatives already scheduled through the 2018/19 school year. As a result, DoDEA has determined a critical need to continue GradeSpeed services until the time in which the organization has fully tested and transitioned over to the Aspen SIS gradebook and parent portal, which is tentatively scheduled to occur in school year 2019/20. At that time, all gradebook service requirements will be fully incorporated into the collective set of requirements for future year SIS acquisition efforts.

9. ANY OTHER SUPPORTING FACTS:

Background: In 2014 DoDEA began a pilot to transition from Gradespeed to the Aspen gradebook. The initial pilot to transition to Aspen was determined to be unsuccessful due to the lack of feature support in the Aspen gradebook at that time, and the initiative was suspended, when concurrent plans were developed to replace the Aspen SIS.

In 2015, after completing 18 months of market research, DoDEA estimated the cost of a new

SIS, inclusive of a full-featured gradebook, to exceed the $1 million threshold for Defense

Business System (DBS) investment by the Deputy Chief Management Office (DCMO). At that time, DCMO advised DoDEA to add its SIS requirement to the DOD wide Learning

Management System Project, which has no projected delivery date. Consequently, DoDEA IT staff was asked to develop a business case in order to seek approval and authorization to proceed with the acquisition of the new SIS.

Unfortunately, extensive delays in the DCMO for reviewing and providing approvals for these acquisition requests has impacted DoDEA’s projected timeline to transition to a new SIS and electronic gradebook. As a result of the delays, SIS program leadership and IT staff have agreed to initiate two consecutive major efforts to upgrade DoDEA’s existing Aspen SIS to the current

5.8 release and then transition from Gradespeed to the upgraded Aspen SIS. The upgrade to the latest version of the Aspen SIS is available at no additional cost to DoDEA.

With the new features available in the Aspen SIS, DoDEA intends to revisit the migration to the

Aspen SIS gradebook and parent portal in an effort to consolidate the enterprise SIS service offerings into a single platform. This will have the added effect of reducing future migration efforts to a new SIS, once timeline delays have been overcome in the DCMO.

DoDEA does not intend to use a separate standalone gradebook after transition to Aspen SIS gradebook services has occurred for all grade levels. Until then, it is imperative that electronic

Page 5 of 6 Pages gradebook services provided by Powerschool GradeSpeed continue to operate in uninterrupted fashion.

10. LISTING OF INTERESTED SOURCES:

Powerschool is the only source/re-seller of Gradespeed.

11. ACTIONS THE AGENCY MAY TAKE TO REMOVE OR OVERCOME BARRIERS

THAT LED TO THE EXCEPTION TO FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION:

Timeline estimates to acquire, install/configure, train, pilot, transition to another gradebook system would require approximately 24-36 months and an additional cost to DoDEA. Since the transition to the Aspen SIS gradebook will take approximately 24-30 months, there is no point in seeking competition for another solution to replace Powerschool’s Gradespeed.