To: Asha Riley
From: Steve Rippl
Date: September 19, 2024
RE: Tech Department Report
From our perspective, it has been a good start to the school year. Our department has been able to deal with the usual high volume of tech assistance requests coming from across the district and KWRL in a timely manner, ensuring that everyone has what they need promptly. A large factor in our success this year is our new employee Ossama, who was great as our summer help and is now settling into the tech support position without any difficulties. While we will miss James when he retires very soon, Ossama is already proving to be a great addition to the team.
Over the summer, we upgraded almost all our Windows clients to Windows 11, finished up our transition to our new virtual server environment, and finally transitioned the last of the district’s PAs and bells off of Informacast and onto our new (cheaper) system. We prepared new Chromebooks for the 5th grade but saved significant funds by letting the 8th grade keep theirs in to high school. We did take in all 8th grade Chromebooks in June just so we could ensure they were all working correctly, and then handed them back as they started their freshman year. We also did routine maintenance things like cleaning all projector filters in the classrooms over the summer, and the middle school bought a few more interactive TVs for their 5/6 math teachers, which were installed with the help of our facilities department.
We made some improvements in the KWRL Portal, making it easier for shop staff to track their time on task, and have released a new shuttle request process for school offices. Next, we’ll be expanding their tracking of student behavior data. We made a start on digitizing WCC registration, check-in/check-out and invoicing, but more is still to be done before we can begin testing that with WCC families. In Sips, we’ve expanded the referral tracking to K-12 so that we can drop our SWIS paid subscription. We’re just ironing out a few things in that as the other buildings adopt it, but the feedback has been positive. Also included now is the student behavior “Chick-In/Check-Out” process that multiple buildings were doing on paper and/or with spreadsheets, which has now been streamlined and incorporated into Sips. An ongoing goal is to continue to expand our data dashboards so we can make use of all the information we’ve been collecting in Sips all these years.