To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: April 22, 2022
RE: Tech Department Report
Unfortunately, we’ve just lost our newest tech, Isaac, to the Longview School District. It’s his local district, and the pay is significantly better, so it’s very understandable, if disappointing. Having had the extra position in the department for over a year now has enabled us to catch up in some areas and even get ahead in others. One of our usual intensive tasks for the summer is prepping new Chromebooks for 5th and 9th grade and upgrading elementary Chromecarts, but this year we purchased all these very early and so are ahead in this regard. Elementary Chromecarts have already been upgraded and all the new 1:1 Chromebooks for next year are already provisioned in our system and ready to be assigned to students. So we’re not asking to replace that position immediately; we’ll wait for union negotiations to hopefully complete and see where we are in a couple of months.
As always (currently), security has been a major focus of our time. We have stricter controls in place now for network administrative accounts, the accounts we use for managing client computers. We now require 2-step authentication, the second step being a physical USB “smart card.” This should ensure that if a desktop computer is compromised in some way there shouldn’t be any way for the attacker to elevate their permissions to be able to cause harm elsewhere on the network. We have also randomized all local administrator accounts, and they are automatically being rotated regularly, again helping ensure one compromised system doesn’t spread. Like all things security-related, it introduces a little more friction into our day-to-day work, but that’s a small price to pay for the significant added safety.
Our parent text tool through Sips is getting wider use, with staff utilizing it for communication around student attendance and LRA and TEAM wanting to try it for their parent communication. Work is still ongoing on the streamlining of TEAM progress reports. They use a more complicated process than LRA, so there is more to it, but progress is being made, and the staff seems very happy with what they are seeing.