NORMAL — At a board meeting last week, McLean County Unit 5 officials announced that their school district, along with neighboring District 87, were selected to represent Illinois in a five-state pilot program funded through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The Illinois State Board of Education selected the two school districts for the pilot program because of the innovative Illini Data system they have developed over the last five years with the help of State Farm Insurance Co., said Unit 5 Superintendent Gary Niehaus.
“We’re just evolving that Illini Data and using it a as a pilot,” said Niehaus.
Illini Data provides teachers with one-stop information source to help make instructional decisions for students. The system provides teachers with access to 29 types of data about each student to help design the best plan for them.
The pilot program is “still very much in a preliminary stage” and “difficult to explain,” said Matt Vanover of the Illinois State Board of Education.
“It’s just kind of an abstract concept, but I believe the goal is to have at least a pilot program up and running by 2013,” said Vanover. “They’re looking at an aggressive time line over the next 18 months.”
The pilot program is expected to develop a computer user interface that teachers and schools in the 44 states participating in the Common Core State Standards Initiative can access to find digital curriculum content.
“It would be similar to like an app store for an iPhone for teachers and schools to use for a bunch of data and curriculum and other tools,” said Vanover. “Teachers would have access to pull that down in their classroom and use with their students.”
According to Vanover, the computer user interface will be different from the Illini Data system.
“This is going to be something new and different,” said Vanover. “It’s not going to be modeled off their (Unit 5 and District 87) stuff.”
The Council of Chief State School Officers selected Illinois, Colorado, North Carolina, New York and Massachusetts to participate in the five-state pilot program.
“They selected five states and felt that Illinois was one of the five states that really could begin to work quickly because of some of the infrastructure we had in place and then it was up to Illinois to pick the pilot districts that would be a part of this,” said Vanover.
Unit 5 and District 87 are the only school districts in the state that will participate in this pilot program, said Vanover.
“At this point in time, we’re looking at only Normal and Bloomington,” said Vanover.
Neither the school districts nor the State of Illinois will receive funds for their participation in this program.
“The states won’t get any money, the districts won’t get any money, but what they’ll do is they’ll get access to this collaborative content that will be available,” said Vanover.
District 87 Superintendent Barry Reilly and Niehaus met with representatives of State Superintendent of Education Chris Koch and representatives of the Gates Foundation Tuesday to discuss the pilot program.