Florida agreed late last month to pay rental fees that could amount to $5.4 million for test questions that Utah Office of Education wrote and which Florida desperately needs.
Utah Superintendent of Public Instruction Martell Menlove told the State Board of Education on Friday that the state education office jumped on the chance of renting out test "items," as the questions are called. He initially thought it might be worth only a few hundred dollars.
"I didn’t realize the magnitude," Menlove told the board. "We anticipate there will be other opportunities as significant as this or greater in the future."
The money, he said, will allow Utah to hire teachers over the summer to write even more queries to add to Utah’s bank of end-of-year test questions.
The board voted to let the state office entertain overtures from other states in the market for test questions, after briefly flirting with the idea of a robust marketing campaign.
