Virginia Statewide K-12 Student Assessment Program (SOL)

The Virginia Department of Education is soliciting proposals for a comprehensive, supplier-hosted cloud solution to manage the full lifecycle of the Virginia Statewide K-12 Student Assessment Program (SOL). The selected vendor will be responsible for the development, scoring, administration, and reporting of the state's modernized assessment program. A critical requirement of the contract is dual-mode delivery, meaning the system must support both online and paper formats that produce comparable scores. The scope includes psychometric services, project management, and the integration of technology-enhanced and constructed-response items to improve teaching and learning outcomes. To qualify, bidders must meet a strict prerequisite of having successfully implemented a statewide K-12 summative assessment system for at least two state clients, with one client having a student enrollment of at least 400,000. The contract emphasizes high security and compliance standards, requiring adherence to VITA security standards, HIPAA, FERPA, and IRS Publication 1075 for federal tax information. Vendors must also provide significant insurance coverage, including 20 million dollars for cyber security liability and 5 million dollars for errors and omissions. The award will be based on best value, considering both technical capability and total cost of ownership. The procurement includes specific goals for Small, Women- and Minority-owned businesses (SWaM) at 42% and Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Businesses (SDVOSB) at 3%. Performance is governed by detailed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with monetary credits for failures in application uptime, incident response, and milestone completion. The solution must be hosted in a secure cloud environment, with all data storage and processing restricted to the United States.