To: Michael Green
From: Steve Rippl
Date: February 14, 2024
RE: Tech Department Report
Even with our levy passing, money is obviously tight across the board right now, and we’ve been even more careful with our spending than usual in the tech department. Of course, deferring maintenance for too long causes its own problems, so we’ve been trying to strike a balance as best we can. One good news is that Google is extending the amount of time they will support Chromebooks going forward, up to 10 years from about 5. Many of the Chromebooks we have in current use were due to age out in the next year or two, and they have all suddenly had their lifetimes extended to 2029! Exactly what our replacement schedule will look like going forward is still to be determined, but this buys us quite a bit of breathing space in the immediate future. Another (smaller) windfall is Gresham School District is surplusing about 50 22” widescreen monitors, which we will be picking up for free later this week. We have been buying 23-24” monitors for staff so this is a little smaller than our standard, but we can backfill a bunch of staff computers that never even got larger widescreen monitors in the first place.
Another arena where we save money is in the use of open-source software wherever possible. Like most IT shops, we utilize server virtualization in order to host multiple virtual services on a single physical server, but rather than using expensive commercial solutions like VMWare or Microsoft, we’ve always used free open-source versions. The system we’ve been using for the last decade has fallen out of favor, though, and is not receiving as much support as it used to, so we are in the process of switching to a different (still free) program. This one is widely used, including in some other school districts in the State, and well supported by its creators (who make money because some people opt to pay for their commercial support). We’ll be gradually transitioning all our virtualized services over to this new system, but it will likely not be until the end of the summer that it’s completed.
We’ve been improving the messaging capabilities of the KWRL Portal, allowing admins to message drivers directly on the tablets they are issued and to message rider families by bus stop instead of just by the whole route. This means the KWRL staff can reduce how many messages go out by directly targeting just those families needing the particular alert. We’re also doing some work required by Google for mass emailing to make it easier for recipients to opt out of notifications if they want to. We’ve also been doing more work around supporting the High School and Beyond Plan in Sips and are gradually improving the district-wide data dashboard capabilities.