A state law regarding student information has impeded his office’s investigation into attendance scrubbing at Ohio schools and, if changed, could save taxpayers at least $432,000 annually, Ohio Auditor Dave Yost said Monday.

Yost recommended the Ohio Board of Education support removing language in statute prohibiting the board or Ohio Department of Education from knowing certain personally identifiable student information. Yost said Ohio and New Hampshire are the only two states with similar laws on the books.

Ohio students are assigned Statewide Student Identifiers, or SSIDs, that are used to track them as they transfer between schools, take tests and graduate. The department cannot link SSIDs with names, so it contracts with a third-party vendor, IBM, to match names, analyze data and compile reports at an annual cost of $752,000.

Yost said the department could perform those tasks in-house for $320,000 and still protect student privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Yost said auditors were able to obtain names for SSIDs from each school district, which cost the investigation 10 days.

“It’s a stupid policy, it doesn’t make sense and it costs money,” Yost told reporters after making his recommendation to the board.

The recommendation follows an interim report given last week on a sampling of 100 Ohio schools. That report found Columbus, Marion, Cleveland Municipal, Toledo and Campbell City Schools in Mahoning County improperly withdrew students from the rolls and re-enrolled them.

Seven of the nine Miami Valley school districts probed have been cleared but the auditor is still analyzing data in Northridge and Hamilton school districts.

Sen. Peggy Lehner, a Republican from Kettering and the Senate Education Committee chairwoman, said the problem of not being able to tie a student identifier to a name has surfaced several times in the past year.

“The process has caused some unnecessary difficulty and it’s certainly something we can look at sooner than later,” Lehner said.

Kettering Superintendent Jim Schoenlein said the law has been a road block for calculating value-added assessments of students between years.

“Frankly, in my mind, that’s a precaution that’s over the top,” Schoenlein said of the law. “It’s not really necessary.”

The auditor’s office estimates the probe has cost nearly $300,000 for nearly 7,000 hours of work. Yost said Monday that he and former Ohio Superintendent Stan Heffner agreed to pay for the audits from the performance bonus fund.

The auditor’s office will release another interim report by Oct. 23 to address those districts that have levies or bonds on the Nov. 6 ballot.