To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: November 2, 2023
RE: Tech Department Report
Well, the dust has settled after the usual busy start to the school year, and as well as catching up with the backlog of helpdesk tickets, we’ve also now had a chance to deploy the approximately 30 new staff desktops that were assembled over the summer. I'm not sure when we’ll be able to purchase the next round of staff computers. We’ll have to see what budgets look like towards the end of this school year. We’re also now assembling and deploying this year’s round of student CTE Windows computers for the middle and high school labs. We have CTE specific funds to keep those labs on a 4-5 year replacement cycle, so those computers never get too old.
We have to make further slight adjustments to the middle school PA system. Old analog audio systems weren’t our area of expertise, and we thought we could emulate what had been done at Columbia a few years previously, where one large amplifier fed by a digital zone controller ran the whole system. We thought we could simply double the amps and run the middle school system the same way, but we have discovered that there are too many disparate “sub-systems” of speakers that require different voltages to run efficiently. So we are in the process of breaking those sets of speakers out onto smaller individual amps (or separate channels on a larger amp), which results in better overall audio quality. The guys in the department have been great at learning about these legacy installations and what’s required to run them.
Data and programing-wise we’ve been fine tuning the KWRL Portal to account for the new bargaining agreement with the drivers (new contract minimums for route times), as well as ironing out some data import bugs introduced by Skyward changes for the other three districts and finalizing reporting for the new trips functionality that was added over the summer. In Sips, we’ve begun to house data tracking for our students’ High School & Beyond Plan tracking, and we’re making adjustments to the TEAM progress tracking.