As you are already aware, Woodland has been approved to receive a Digital Learning Access grant from our State. Erate is a Federal program that contributes towards our Internet connectivity costs and will also cover part of the cost of certain networking equipment, primarily switches, and wireless access points, the idea being this is what’s needed to get “the Internet” into the classroom. For our District Erate will cover 70% up to a certain limit per building for each round of the program. The current 5 year round of funding finishes this year, and it’s still unclear whether it will continue, so to encourage Districts to utilize as much of the available Federal funding as needed their grant covers the remaining costs, so it ends up not costing the District anything.
This is enabling us to plan for about $100,000 of network upgrades in the next year. We’ll get new data cabling in place in the primary school portables so they are ready to support more wireless devices in the future, and new access points in every classroom in the primary school ready for reconfiguration. We’ll upgrade the fiber connection between the primary and middle schools to increase bandwidth there. The existing fiber is ~20 years old, this upgrade will serve us for the next 20. We’ll also be upgrading a large number of access points and a few switches throughout the District to put our wireless hardware on a very up-to-date footing. It’s a great opportunity to update a lot of our network in one go and will mean we can defer further costs in this area some way down the road.
Sips is our “swiss army knife” data application in that we can adjust it to fit people’s requirements as needed. We recently started working with Stacy Mouat on attendance data with a goal of automating parent “nudge” emails when their child reaches certain levels of absence. This work is still ongoing, but along the way we’ve now automated the process of monitoring and creating the State required letters that go out at certain thresholds. Now secretaries receive an email notice that a student has reached the mandated threshold for a school letter to go home, and they can print it directly from within Sips, rather than having to run manual reports every morning out of Skyward. We hope to have the parent emails going out before the winter break.