Arizona's ASP project hits snags. (Notebook: education information from schools, business, research and professional organizations).

The precedent-setting Arizona ASP project suffered technical difficulties this spring. Gov. Jane Hull forced Phil Geiger, executive director of the Arizona School Facilities Board, to choose between his official state education duties and his moonlighting business as a private technology consultant. Geiger chose the latter. His replacement, James Jurs, took over last month.

Last summer, Geiger and other officials outlined the plan to wire all 268 school districts and link them through an ASP--an application service provider--at a cost of $27.9 million. Cox Business Services, an ASP vendor, will eventually make 250 educational software packages available to all 918,000 K-12 public school students and their teachers on a 24/7 basis. The state is paying Qwest Communications an additional $100 million to provide the needed broadband to access the online content off the ASE To date, 900 of the 1,200 public schools are wired. The rest will be connected by late summer.

In his letter of resignation, Geiger reminded the governor that he had never intended to be a "life-long state bureaucrat, but was willing to provide public service to the state." He took the executive director's job three years earlier with the understanding that he could accept private consulting jobs on a limited basis.

All apparently went smoothly until last fall, when the attorney general's office investigated accusations that he had received a $1,000 honorarium from LearningStation, a content and technology vendor hired as part of the ASP project, and that he also took several out-of-state trips paid for by LearningStation.

The attorney general's office has since admitted that it has insufficient evidence to bring any charges against Geiger, a former district superintendent who once sat on LearningStation's advisory board. Meanwhile, Arizona technology officials are forging ahead. The East Valley Tribune, however, has revealed more snags. The local Mesa daily reported that two technology directors in the Mesa and Marana Unified School Districts complained that the ASP network was difficult to navigate and that some passwords were not working correctly. Calls to these two districts to confirm these technology problems were not returned.