State Admin Director Teresa Luna is turning the podium over to former Sen. John Goedde to present the Idaho Education Network portion of her budget presentation; Goedde is working as a consultant to Gov. Butch Otter. He started off by disputing some of the findings of the recent service audit that the Legislature requested on the IEN. “For example, the 8 pieces of equipment that were reported missing, seven of them were found in other classrooms in the buildings,” Goedde said. He said usage of broadband provided by the IEN has gone up. “It’s important to Idaho education,” Goedde told JFAC.

“There are a number of reasons why school districts are not using the video conferencing equipment as much as they could be,” Goedde said, including that when the State Board of Education removed the requirement for online classes that was part of the voter-repealed “Students Come First” laws, “there was less need.” Also, differences in schedules between schools make it harder to match up classes.

JFAC Co-Chair Maxine Bell, R-Jerome, told Goedde, “It was not an audit, it was an agreed upon-procedural report and there is no formal response to one of those. We’re not performance auditors. We appreciate them finding something that could have been found otherwise, that was the whole point of the exercise, and let’s move on , let’s move on from there.”