Mapping District Telecommunications
Matt Briggs, Casey Forbes, Ashley Wasson, Susan Williams
Access and Security/ Location
The room is locked and a swipe card is needed to access. There are 7 network engineers and 2 CTOs who have rights to the room. The room is located at our Technology Center, fairly centralized in the district. In the near future, the entire Technology Center will be locked to all visitors. Visitors will need to use a phone outside the front entrance to call the secretary to be let in the building.
Bandwith capabilities are 2 GIG Internet with Egress link for the district and 10 GIG for each middle and high school with only 1 GIG for elementary and central services
There is an organization of 68 people, 18 are instructional tech facilitators.
Each middle and high school has its own server in the building.
Tech Council is made up of 9-12 members, which include principals, our lead tech facilitator our Chief Technical Officer, and an assistant superintendant
They develop policy in house, who sends it to the the tech council, then to a strategic council (a microcosm of 3 school board members) and then taken to the full school board for vote. Usually if it gets here it is passed. They look at things such as movement of netbooks from the middle schools to the elementary schools, fees for Chrome books in middle and high schools, but they do not generate policy.
North Carolina requires that LEAs have to have a plan approved by the state and county Board of Education. Ours was written in 2006 (thank you Dr. Cheney) and updated every 2 years. It is in the process of being updated now.
Wireless Capablilites
G wireless 803, some N wireless routers, want to upgrade to Clear Pass for extra usage for middle and high school ( what about elementary?) and it is a restricted system.
The technology budget is less than 3% of the total budget
The county gives about 1.7 million and the state gives about 300K. Of course we don't have a budget right now. The plan is to have a COLD site off the main technology campus, housed at a school with the room for such. Currently there are 3 servers in the building and when our servers are rebuilt this time there will be 5 copies of data.
Personnel
We do not have a Chief Informational Officer at this time (budget cuts). There is a Chief Technical Officer, a technician in every middle and high school, a tech facilitator shared at each middle and high school cluster, with one engineer per 10 elementary schools and 1 instructor per 5 elementary schools. The goal is to have one in each school in the next five year. They support over 42000 students and over 50000 computers including the ones that teachers use.
Building
There are 2 big Leibrig surge protectors for our district units and 2 redundant large air conditioning units working at 50% capacity for our network room. They are harnessed together so that if one unit goes down, the other will work at 100% until the down unit gets repaired. There should be back up with a generator outside the building as well. The temperature is strictly controlled in the room.