State education staff outline progress on Minimum School Program automation to reduce spreadsheet errors
Summary
USBE staff described progress on MSPA, the Minimum School Program Automation project, which aims to replace complex spreadsheets with an online system to calculate school allocations. Staff reported completed modules, ongoing development items, and plans for LEA access and public dashboards once QA is complete.
Utah State Board of Education staff reported progress on MSPA, the Minimum School Program Automation project designed to centralize and automate calculations that allocate nearly $8 billion in state and local K–12 funds.
Dale Frost, minimum school program administrator, said MSPA will pull required inputs from state systems, run program formulas centrally, and produce consistent allocations while reducing human error caused by thousands of spreadsheet cell references. “There are 35 steps in this calculation for districts and 51 steps for charters in some formulas,” Brett Baker, MSP analyst, said, describing how complex Excel workbooks currently drive allocations.
Staff told the committee that MSPA has moved many calculations into the system, completed system-data updates and addressed differences between Excel and the system’s calculation engine (noting rounding to 15 decimal places as a mitigation). The team has completed calculations for multiple programs and reported recent additions to the list of completed programs. The stated goal is to finish core functionality and move to maintenance mode by the end of the school year, after which LEA-level access and public dashboards will be rolled out.
Project manager Katrina Cole said her development team has improved cross-team collaboration and is pushing iterative code updates; she noted requirements vary in complexity and the team is scheduling steady releases. Staff said auditors from the state auditor’s office previously recommended reducing spreadsheet-based risks; MSPA is intended to address that recommendation and provide the automated “source of truth” for allocations.
Staff said they are not yet providing LEA user accounts in MSPA while calculations and QA continue; they will open access when the agency is confident the system and reports are stable. Committee members asked about funding for MSPA and public availability; staff said they would provide details on project funding and timelines outside the meeting.
