To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: April 17, 2024
RE: Tech Department Report
While I was away over Spring Break, enjoying a trip back to Europe to visit friends and family, the guys were busy working behind the scenes on various maintenance tasks. We replaced a couple of network switches as part of our ongoing Erate supported upgrades, and classroom projector filters were cleaned in some of the buildings. We’ve been migrating our iPad management to a new (free) service (because the old one stopped being free!), and that was mostly completed. We’ve made great progress in migrating our virtual servers to the new system I mentioned in the last report.
We’re also now preparing for the new version of Windows (11), as support for Windows 10 will end in October. We’re preparing our staff and student images and testing/adjusting our existing policies to make sure the desktops are as secure as possible. We’ll start deploying a few new Windows 11 machines in the next couple of months, and then over the summer there'll be a big push to upgrade all our existing Windows computers over to it. I’m also wondering how many of our staff can gradually transition to Chrome desktops, mainly for security reasons, but that’s something to be worked out in cooperation with our various teams.
We’ve also begun a significant piece of work in Sips to transition the primary record keeping of student referrals over to Sips for the whole district, along with other related support processes like the classroom check in/check out and monitoring suspensions. The high school has already been utilizing Sips for this for a few years, while the elementary schools have been using a paid product called SWIS. We’re currently pulling historical data from SWIS into Sips and creating new referral processes that will run K12 next school year. We are also still adding to the scope of the student record keeping for their High School and Beyond Plans. Students have already begun to track some components of this in Sips, and by the end of the year, we’ll have a full plan structure built for them.