To: Asha Riley
From: Steve Rippl
Date: November 6, 2025
RE: Tech Department Report
Now that we are through September and October, things have calmed down, and our department is returning to its more normal pace. Tech-wise things seem good overall, our staff have had access to what they need to do their work pretty much as soon as they got back, we’ve been responsive to problems and new requests alike.
We are still somewhat behind in our Chromebook hardware repairs after being more shorthanded than usual over the summer. This isn’t for current student devices, but for our pool of older devices that have come back from students who have left the district. These devices are used to backfill broken devices that can’t be repaired, sometimes needing repair themselves first, or if they are in too bad shape, then stripped for salvageable spare parts.
A recurring theme at the moment is the need to keep up with the relentless forward march of all our tech systems. An example of this is Google Sign Builder, an app that Google developed many years ago to turn cheap little Chromeboxes into wall display kiosks. It’s how we show slideshows on the various display TVs across the district, largely because it was free! Google changed how they are handling Chrome apps some time ago, and Sign Builder is going away in a few months as Google has decided not to update it. The alternatives are commercial digital signage solutions, but in a couple of days, we managed to put together our own free version that is compatible with Google’s Workspace administration system.
Another example is an open source library for generating PDFs, that we use in our KWRL Portal and Sips applications, is no longer supported by the latest server operating system. We’ve found an alternative, but it took a few days to work out how to integrate it into our applications. This kind of thing is happening pretty constantly in the background, as we upgrade systems, we have to juggle the various dependencies for the services we run.
And speaking of our in-house applications, in the last couple of months in Sips, we’ve been working on data dashboards, made the data entry for student goal tracking easier for teachers, and started tracking positive behavior points for students (PBIS). There is also on-going work to continue to streamline progress tracking for our TEAM staff. In the KWRL Portal we’ve made a number of small improvements around how student care plans are managed, and improved reporting for trips.