Committee asks staff to pursue lower‑cost tweaks to public licensing lookup; full redesign postponed

Committee members debated how much disciplinary information should be publicly accessible via the educator licensing lookup and whether the change requires a separate disciplinary database or smaller user‑interface changes to the existing Cactus lookup tool.

Chair Carey said parents often want school‑level visibility and that the current lookup overwhelms users by returning every licensed educator with a given name; she demonstrated the lookup and said showing which educators at a school have disciplinary histories would be more helpful. "When I look up a district and I wanna see or I look up my school, if I get every teacher in the school, that is far less helpful than if I look up a school and find the individuals in that school who have a disciplinary history," Carey said.

Jared Felt, USBE IT director, described the technical options: a full, separate disciplinary lookup would be costlier (~$135,000) while adding flags or iconography to the current lookup or adding category checkboxes would be a smaller programming lift. The committee asked staff to explore lower‑cost options and to report back in October; the motion to postpone until the October meeting passed unanimously.