To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: October 22, 2021
RE: Tech Department Report
As well as all the summertime work we talked about last month, the other piece we’ve been heavily involved with is our support of our staff's data and process streamlining needs. Over the summer and into the start of the new school year, we’ve established a new high school referral system within Sips that will enable Phil and Dan to better track who is getting referrals and correlate that with other data about the students. We’ve also begun to support their help squad by integrating notes on the students into Sips, and we’ll soon import current F data and be able to automatically flag and assign students into the different program levels as needed. We’re also now able to import LRA course progress data into Sips and generate monthly progress reports for them.
There are lots of small adjustments going into the KWRL Portal all the time, but a large piece recently has been tracking driver leave. This has greatly reduced the amount of paper flowing between the KWRL and business offices, and both administrators and drivers can now easily see up-to-date information on leave balances. We’ve also added the ability to manage SPED routes. GenEd and SPED routes are very different in terms of their data needs, and what we had in place wasn’t working for managing SPED routes, again forcing the office to still rely on lots of spreadsheets. Now they can be managed within the portal, and admins, school office staff, and parents can all clearly see SPED route assignments and times as needed.
A piece that has been overlooked for a long time has been our tech department’s own processes and data needs. The system we were using to track our own inventory and network security (in terms of what devices get on the network) was put in place over a decade ago and hadn’t been touched much since. As we steadily got busier and busier, we’d outgrown that system, but only recently (with the extra tech staffing) had the capacity to go back and update things as needed. Now we have it integrated into the same system we use for our classroom inventories, and we’re able to track devices, student device assignments, and digitize our AUP and Digital Learning Agreement (1:1) forms, making it much easier for us, our registrar, and libraries to manage student forms and devices. There’s still more work for us to do here, but we’re on a sounder footing from which to be working!
Lastly, it’s sad news that our Tech II Will is leaving us. I think it’s a great career move for Will, our high school graduate, to move on and up into the world of server management for a larger company, and we wish him all the best! We hope we can find someone else who cares about the district and its people as much as he does!