To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: January 19, 2023
RE: Tech Department Report
It was a relatively busy winter holiday break for our department, not helped by the repeated power outages various schools experienced! Power outages are hard on the AV equipment in the high school classrooms. We’ve had quite a few of them damaged that way already, so over the break, we installed small inline surge protectors on them all in an attempt to minimize further losses (the units are under small wall covers next to the projectors, so there isn’t a lot of space for more protection). We also continued with our Windows server software upgrades, ensuring operating systems were fully up-to-date and secure.
Work on the new phone system continues. Over the break, we successfully tested our secondary/backup SIP connection to AllStream. This is meant to ensure that if we lose our primary K20 Internet connection, our phone system will work correctly through our backup connection. We’re now continuing to build out the PBX pieces we need for each of our campuses, working on 911 failover to POTS lines if needed and the alerting/monitoring of 911 calls. The hope is to have enough in place to be able to switch one of our Elementary schools over to it during Spring break, but only if everything is ready.
We are ready to start another round of staff computer upgrades. Again we’ve opted to buy components and are putting the machines together ourselves. Prices do seem to be coming down a little here and there, but it’s still much cheaper for us to go this route. Obviously, there’s the time taken to assemble machines, but it’s something our guys can do gradually in between other things. We’re also starting to investigate which model of Chromebook to purchase for next year’s 5th and 9th-grade students (the grades at which the students receive a new one).
And amongst other things, we’ve recently been involved with helping the high school with their tier support reporting, as well as the data they need to collect for the Freshman success study they are involved with. We’re also improving things for the KWRL shop and their paperless maintenance tracking and have been working with Geotab to get the data across so that KWRL parents will be able to see where their student’s bus is on a phone app.