To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: May 18, 2023
RE: Tech Department Report
Over Spring Break, we got both North Fork and Columbia Elementary schools switched over to our new phone system, and since then transitioned to the high school office. Our plan now is to move over to the middle school offices before school is out for the summer so that all the primary lines are in place before everyone leaves. Final classrooms at the middle and high school will be switched over the summer break, completing the migration. This will bring our annual licensing costs down from over $10k per year (which we weren’t paying, but it meant we could no longer expand or update our existing phone system) to around $500 per year.
Our employee that was on extended leave is now back with us part-time, and that has enabled us to complete our planned new staff computer builds. The next steps are identifying our oldest (but still regularly used) computers to start swapping them out. Our new inventory system includes detailed information about the system age, who/where it is assigned to, and if it is in active use, so it’s relatively easy to compile this list. We’ll likely begin switching them out before the summer, but the bulk will happen over the break.
And speaking of summer, we’re making plans for our projects and priorities for the break. As well as what’s been mentioned above, we need to renovate the middle school bells/PA system, we’ll have new Chromebooks to prepare for 5th and 9th grade, and the Skyward to Qmulative migration will need careful attention because of all the external systems that rely on data extract from our SIS. We’ve begun rebuilding all those exports already to try and ease the migration, but it will still take careful attention once the switch is made to make sure all the data is flowing correctly.
With the levy loss, a bunch of elementary school Chromebooks that have now (relatively long since) aged out will be going out of service and not be replaced, leaving North Fork and Columbia well short of 1:1. It seems this will cause problems with the delivery of their digital curriculum, so they’re looking how to minimize the impacts on learning. Our department is also losing a tech employee, which will put us a little more into survival mode. Doing our best to keep up with demand, but I’m sure we’ll gradually start to slip behind in various ways.