Date: October 15th 2026
To: Asha Riley
From: Steve Rippl
Subject: Tech Dept. Executive Summary
It was a busy summer for us as always, and we were grateful to have extra temporary help in the form of Tayler Summers, a Para from the high school. He helped us with processing returned Chromebooks, going through all the 8th grade devices before re-issuing them back to the students for 9th grade, and prepping the new 5th grade Chromebooks.
Those new 5th grade Chromebooks are now in homeroom carts as the middle school experiments with a new 1:1 model where the students pick up their device at the start of the day, and put it back at the end. Students can be allowed to take home a device if that’s needed, but this way we hope to ensure that devices are charged and ready to go each day, something that can be a struggle when the devices go home each day.
We also managed to go through all the classroom carts at Columbia Elementary, making repairs as needed and replacing 100 Chromebooks as part of our refresh cycle. We had done the same thing at North Fork the previous year. We’re approaching an “end of support” cliff with our elementary school devices where a large portion of them will need to be replaced in a couple of years time, so we’ll need to focus on this more this summer and next.
We’ve made some significant changes to how students interact with our technology to try to help the students stay more focused. The elementary and middle schools have switched to an “allow list only” model for internet filtering. This means that all sites are blocked by default, and we only allow the ones that teachers have requested and the buildings have approved. We have also now blocked YouTube district-wide for students. Teachers can still embed specific videos into Google classroom for students to view there, but they shouldn’t be able to browse YouTube. Previously, we were running their “restricted” version of YouTube for schools, which was meant to be focused around educational content, but we found that students could still find plenty of content that proved distracting in class.
For the middle and high school students taking their devices home, we’ve also imposed a device curfew, limiting the hours it’s available for use. This may adversely affect a few students that like to do their work at the very last minute, but we have warned them so they are aware. We have seen too many instances of students being on devices late into the night not doing anything productive, and so we are trying not to facilitate that any further.
We’ve had quite a bit of change on the staff side of things, and I’m appreciative of how well our teachers are “rolling with it”. We’ve moved our printer management of the copier over to a product called Papercut that many school districts utilize. It improves printing reliability, and lets teachers “badge into” copiers to retrieve documents. It has meant some changes in peoples’ routines for how they print, but has solved some other problems we had previously. We’re now moving towards removing as many individual office and classroom printers as is feasible to save on printing costs long term. This is easier in some buildings than others, but we’re still in the process of figuring out what exactly this looks like in the end.
Phishing attacks on school districts in the last year have become more sophisticated now that most districts have 2-factor authentication in place. Unfortunately, in the last 9 months we have had several staff fall for them and give the bad actors access to their accounts. In checking audit logs, we know they didn’t steal data, they simply used the accounts to try and launch more attacks, trying to trick people out of money. To put the lid on this we’ve imposed very strict security restrictions whereby people can only access our Google Workspace data (and any “log in" with Google connected applications like Skyward) on district owned devices, or personal devices that have been pre-approved by us. This means that even if a member of staff accidentally gives away their credentials and 2nd factor, the bad actors can’t log in on new devices anyway. Most staff are now under this restriction, and again have been very patient as we trouble shoot the few cases where they needed access from home computers and weren’t already approved. We’ll be rolling it out to the final staff fairly shortly.
And we have more teachers in the middle and high schools experimenting with using Chromebooks as their primary computers. For the most part it’s working well, but we are having some “glitches” with one particular model of Chromebook where it is losing the connection to the external monitor and projector after some time. We have a temporary work-around and are working with the vendor to figure out what the issue is.
Over the summer, we also made quite a few updates to our custom applications. In Sips we’re now supporting the “Student of Concern” forms that are at the heart of the evolving MTSS process in our buildings, replacing our old GIT/BIT process. We’re also helping to track PBIS points that students earn in the middle school, helping middle and high school staff track student tardies more easily, and have updated aspects of the TEAM and LRA Student Learning Plan and progress tracking. There were a few updates within the KWRL Portal. The biggest on-going project there is route navigation for drivers. And our in-house inventory tracking application now sends parents notifications about repairs to their student’s Chromebooks, so they are better informed about how their children are handling the devices.