The Fall River School Committee Technology Subcommittee convened on April 28, 2022, to address several critical technology initiatives. The meeting commenced with a discussion on digital platforms and usage analysis, where a refined spreadsheet categorizing software by its application (e.g., adult instruction, assessment, core curriculum) was presented. Key discussions revolved around the necessity of integrating financial cost data, analyzing usage patterns by school, and ensuring consistent application of platforms across the district. The committee specifically noted the underutilization of programs like "Papers," an online tutoring service, and "Dream Box," a math program, with plans to scale back or replace them with more effective alternatives like "ST Math." The subcommittee also reviewed a revised organizational chart for the technology department, which was well-received for its improved clarity. Members suggested minor adjustments to visually represent positions of equal standing and urged for the expedited posting and hiring of newly approved positions, citing recruitment difficulties. The integration of FRSD TV under the Office of Technology was discussed, with a future goal of enhancing its instructional and educational programming. A motion to refer the proposed salary matrix for the technology department, designed to align with industry standards and improve employee retention, to the full committee was passed unanimously. This discussion included a strong emphasis on the benefits of unionizing these positions for long-term stability. Concluding the meeting, a comprehensive report on chromebook data and management was provided. This included statistics on 1,336 chromebooks deemed unrepairable over the past 18 months, details on a new partnership with AGI Repair for parts and credits, and the strategic decision to replace teacher chromebooks with Windows-based machines due to performance limitations. A recent security incident at Durfee High School, where a student used a personal cell phone and Airdrop to display inappropriate content on a digital bulletin board, was clarified as an immediate, non-network-related issue that was swiftly resolved. The meeting concluded with a call to re-evaluate and potentially rescind the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy, with committee members advocating for exclusive use of school-provided devices to enhance educational focus and content control.
AI-generated summary. May contain errors. Watch the video to verify.
Education
Public / Other
okay i'd like to call together this technology subcommittee meeting can you please call the roll miss dragon here mr bailey here miss larabee just for the identification of the public miss laravey is on uh google meet or zoom so she'll be joining us remotely personal to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting who may transmit the meeting through any medium
0:23attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible is there any citizen input there is no there's no citizen input today we're going to jump right into the first item which is a discussion digital platform oh sorry pledge allegiance to supply of the united states of america and to the
0:49republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you so first item is digital platforms and usage analysis madam superintendent okay i'm going to actually turn that over to um to mr farias who's going to start us off i i just want to say what we did here is we cleaned it up because last time when we met um the spreadsheet was all over the place right and
1:25when frank and scott myself dr curley met we wanted to make sure we separated some of those platforms are used by adults in order to teach right some of it is like our assessment platform etc and some of it is you know to uh for tier two or tier two uh tier three instructions so we want to make sure and some of it comes with our core curriculum as part of our core
1:47curriculum so i wanted to separate all of that so that you would actually see because it looked initially like it was a big mishmash i think we did it well the team did a good job breaking it out and segregated it it was messy it kind of looked like we had more when we when we verbalized what we were using and what we were doing with each one it didn't seem
2:12as massive with that being said we dwindled it down we at the bottom of the i think he has both pages i made a thing that says sun setting so that means we're either going to do away with that software we we've had discussions the curriculum team with curriculum leaders at the schools principals and everyone agrees that some of the stuff is redundant they've agreed to get rid of those items
2:41that are at the bottom of the spreadsheet some of them are grant funded and they won't be done i think this is year two of three verizon paid for um the three-year um platform when that ends those will sunset and they'll they'll begin to not use that we kind of wrote what subject uh what levels they were they're being used at we didn't get a lot of the like some of the costs it was like
3:14included including it it was included in the curriculum purchases so it was like when tracy you know purchased the curriculum packages the digital piece was included in that price so there was no yearly fee for that software yeah so it's tough to break out the other the other kind of big fines that we came to the we came to the conclusion like two um papers a huge expense we had great
3:42vision for it it kind of hasn't been deployed hasn't been hasn't taken off like we thought it would so we're thinking maybe next year to scale that back i think we have 6 000 accounts to 1200 accounts and assign them as needed like if the school give me to the guidance counselors no one at home really can work with them there's no older sibling or parent at home they're working like that might be
4:08a nice resource for them to reach out be able to uh chat send a message and get um 24 7 support outside of the classroom do we need 6 000 accounts no that will cut that cost down dream box was another big ticket item that we've been using for a while kind of it's been i don't i'm not the math expert but i think it's more it was more of a comfort it was like a
4:35comfort thing like we've always used it how can we not but there's different programs have come out emerged they've shown that they've been successful at some of the schools so st math will be going forward what they use across the board but any other any of the other programs if you want in-depth like there's a little summary about everyone here what is on page two where it looks
5:03like there's a link where we could look at on these uh that that's where we would see the usage and how has that broken out as far as i haven't looked at it yet but so if i click on those links am i going to see usage by school by um you know so it's i think it was two mo it was let me open one up it would april separated by school yes
5:31yeah it's broken out by school it's basic it's not um there's no teachers names it's basically how many logins how many um i know imagine learning was broken up actually this is what's being used this is the goal that we were targeting at this is how much of that goal we met but it's broken out by school and i only asked that because we don't need to go into detail on all these at the
5:54supplement yeah but this is a good report but i think we need to like i have a lot of questions on what is here now but i think we can be between now in the full meeting get some of those answers of like how much money it costs i think that is important for us to see yeah what are we actually spending what are we actually saving what combining that with the usage so if we're spending
6:15short money and a lot of usage that's a great program you know like we i've never felt comfortable with uh oh yeah that's what we're using and we're all using it with fidelity and that so that's been my um input is asking some of these questions so it's not to you all are the experts but i think sometimes we're all over the place and we need to get focused so we know which
6:38programs work and which uh which don't miss larvae do you have any questions on this i do um i i really appreciate uh how you guys pull this together um i don't know if this question or comment would fall under um curriculum and and but i would like to uh read it as if like all the men uh curriculum and what they're using for under math and all the english ela instead of
7:09having to go all the way to the right to see what it is see it laid out under subject and how many schools are using it i think it would just be easier we're not i don't want to speak to anybody else i'm not as familiar as obviously you guys are as is i'm still getting to know what they're using and for what curriculum so i think it's just under say math english ela
7:40and whatever else we're using right off the top
8:01then you'd have to go find the math down there for middle school and some of it said district what what's the diff uh difference uh superintendent between districts and all schools that was on there because some of those are our programs that we use as a district for the adults right so some of that is uh like uh illuminate that those are by district leadership we all use it
8:30and so it's not um when we say in schools like so if it's a program that's used by students to facilitate and enhance learning or if it's a district program that we're using to support what we do the work that we do like illuminate is is a data collection like we housing we can break that down we what we'll do is we'll break it down we'll use this and break it down by content
8:57and get it to for friday in the friday email well that's tomorrow we might be able to do that um so we'll get it we'll get that information for for that that's a good point i'd appreciate it thank you mr bailey any questions no not really i think i mean from the last meeting this laid out a ton and you know as mimi you're saying i don't um i think with things being laid on
9:24subject it'll be a little bit more organized um to see things uh my biggest thing is it's always like i said consistency to make sure that um you know something successful in one area why not just have it across the district so thank you so my only comments on it would be uh the financial costs i think would be important to have uh i think we can make this a little more user-friendly as far as like
9:48size and like how it looks i agree with miss laravey by subject would be great but this is a good first step and then like as we go we're going to get into like a little more details the thing is that i'm concerned about is fidelity of use across the district so i've heard way too many times in this district that we have we're paying for something and we're not using it we're
10:10not using it with fidelity or one school using one another school's using another so we can never figure out what is working so i think you're on the right track to try to streamline that to make sure that that happens um what i would ask that and it doesn't have to be for this month but i think a goal of this would be to just send a report out once
10:28a month once we get it right so we say okay here's the 10 or 20 curriculum programs that we're using online so without even having a meeting we should get a uh like a one pager or a dashboard or something to say here's the usage by school of all of whatever these things are so we think that the schools should be using x here's what the monthly report shows because it's going to hold people
10:51accountable to making sure that they're doing it right and if they're not and the program is not working or whatever they need to tell you then you need to tell us we're going to cancel it we pay for things in this district just wasting money because it's the flavor of the month that's an editorial by me but that's what i've i've felt like it's been oh sounds good this is good like you said
11:09that too anymore expensive i think that was well the intention so i i will say that the intention of that was good right we were coming out of cove it was during covet that we um had explored that that was an online tutoring program it was our goal was to provide access to all of our students not every parent can afford to get a tutor for their child right and not everybody everybody has
11:32the ability to help their child with their work so this we researched this many districts are using it it was you know uh one of the things that was we had attended some demos on it and we thought okay this is an opportunity for our kids it's an opportunity for our families yes frank is absolutely right we thought it was going to be more widely received than it wasn't and it's like everything else we
11:56learned from the experience it wasn't so first we wanted to make it available for all secondary six through 12 and say okay so if a tenth grader works at mcdonald's and gets home at nine o'clock and they need help with their algebra homework they're going to be able to access that tutor on 24 7 parent center release all of that stuff it wasn't as widely received it was year
12:16one i don't know if it's just because of implementation but we the good part about going through this process is that we actually went through every single program how are we using it what are we using it across the board yes we need to have consistency we also need to know that we have some specific populations in different schools that they might use something that other schools don't use and you're
12:37going to see those anomalies but that the intention was good um we still we still think it we need that access but we're going to scale it back maybe we don't have every single 6th through 12th grader but we're going to have licenses available at every school and we're going to try to encourage students who may need that access to be able to utilize it but we're going to scale it back and yeah
13:00the piece that i i still don't understand is that if we're going to pick a program like you said go through this process i would assume that if it was you said middle school and high school yeah so i would assume that the middle school and high school administrations were part of that process so if i'm part of that process and i tell you as superintendent we'd like to get this program for children that have
13:20the needs which i agree they have then it's on me as the administrator to make sure that we're using what we ask you to pay for and ask the school committee to pay for and i think that's where the missing link has come in whereas we've got to say if you're the principal and you want a program make sure we're going to use it it's a good program you think it's good yes
13:36okay so then we need to follow up to say are you using it because we know at the middle school and the high school we have many kids that are still struggling they work they don't have they need a tutor why are they not using it so if everybody was perfect and doing great we would have needed the program in the first place so i just think that's the missing link if not trying to give
13:53anybody a hard time but i do think that if we're going to say oh we'll use this program then we're going to use it that's would be my no matter what it is whether it's uh on these so i do think this is much better let's just keep keep the process going and um maybe even if you tweak it and send it to us and then we can tweak it again
14:13before the two weeks so that foreign anything else on this maybe you're good okay this part's all set anybody that needs to leave feel free to leave and move on to the next agenda item the organizational shop including fred tv so we took your suggestions after the last meeting and we cleaned it up and we tried to break it down you'll see on the graph it's by color so um pink is the technology integration side
14:46uh purple is the sims side blue is the technology services side light green is spread tv frg tv and then you'll notice there's a little dark green box that's um our individual that runs the copy center for the district you'll notice that on the list there are open positions those are the positions that were approved at the last meeting that we will be posting in the near future it's broken down by content area so
15:13any suggestions that you may have or comments we can continue to tweak the document any questions on the summary no not i think this looks a lot cleaner than it did before i think it looks great to be completely honest thank you i would agree i think this is a good um document i know we talked about having this for all we have our schools i mean so it just helps to see you know sort of
15:44what happens and who's under who you know and all that stuff i did notice that under the high school i had mentioned that i think all facilitators need to be under the thing so these people that are on here working like that's the for instance it says high school facilitator then the same job description but under is it are those three people like equal or is that under no they're either just for
16:08size it's just the size of the document yeah and just so you know we i purchased software so that we could do this and we're actually planning on using it for the for everyone so everyone will have a you know the same look across the district yep i would just i know you said it's a software stuff i can you get what i'm saying it looks like as if the person on the top is the
16:29like the leader of the other two so even if you have to shrink the um i'll shrink the boxes so that we'll put the same like maybe in that one box you put the three people's names if they have the same title so that it it makes it look like they're uh sort of all equal i can do that and i can we can have it sent to you know the
16:46friday email that's a very quick fix yep the um the only other question i had was we're going back to that same one so the gentleman that's listed here is he a district-wide facilitator at the high school so i see elizabeth lewis and then marcus hartman as the second person and there's an open position so there's three high school facilitators you know positions uh these two actually doing high school
17:14tech facilitator work like the ones at the middle school like are they equal to what they're doing so they're all credentialed whatever that means for the world they're all equally well credentialed they're all the credentials are the required credentials are the same people might be in a different place because somebody might be in a waiver and they're working towards that and we work like we do with anybody else
17:41like this yes like whatever right correct yeah i think that would um make sense to know is this for the budget uh you have three now do you have an open position now or do you have no that's for july one that's for july one those open positions so anything that's on here that's open are the anticipated positions that we approved at the last meeting that will be posted after we discussed the salary matrix this meeting
18:05and the full committee in a few weeks yeah so uh i can make that anticipated if it no no my thought on that was just that these positions are hard to fill across this like everybody's struggling first so we've talked about we're posting having sort of anticipated and then i personally would say pull the trigger when you need to as far as i'm concerned but even though the like it's the next year in july like
18:29as far as i'm concerned and you say you know what uh joe is a great employee and i would like to bring him on now may 10th instead of may you know july one as far as this member offer when you say you think you've got a person that you want i think go go for it before the july 1 if need we agree we we are going to talk about the matrix
18:52because we need that to happen and hopefully that's going to be referred to the full committee so that we're going to we're going to post them as anticipated and if that gets approved then we'll be able to hire them immediately i i agree with you we need to hire them as soon as we get catching yes especially i mean we've had discussions about how hard it is to fill these positions i would rather get a
19:09jump start on some of the districts and just actually just get people in so we can get going that would be much appreciated the only question i had was on the um we had talked about putting foot tv under this at the office of technology so that's done because that's just a move that you can make i'd like to at some point try to figure out uh like a longer term plan on that whole
19:36green section so that we can look at i know we tried to get it as a vogue program and all that other stuff but now that it's under this and then you have a new person at the high school like as far as i'm concerned i think we need to get more uh instruction in that out of that department not that anything's going bad i just think there's a need for
20:00for more of it as far as like being in the school side so a lot of times we i for one can't can't figure out like is it a the district you know taping meetings going here going there but like the school like maybe they're dividing up of somehow so we all know here's what the people that are on the fred tv pay for with you for school school-based stuff
20:24so that we can oh yeah well that sounds good that's working great let's have a second instructor if the kids are getting a benefit out of that let's get a third instructor that's where what i'm saying not that it's gonna be there's nothing wrong with it but i think we haven't focused enough on the instructional educational part of it so that we can say no let's get it to the middle schools let's add an
20:45instructor let's add a program let's that's so that would be for future but now that it's under you you can i guess take it and run with it okay anything else okay we'll move on thank you very much good presentation next up is a discussion on the salary matrix for the technology department so you have in front of you the proposed ranges for the new positions you also have some current positions in this packet
21:14that i'm just trying to align the salary structure to more of an industry standard so again we keep talking about training employees getting some excellent employees we train them we work them up and then they leave because they're able to get more money elsewhere what i'm trying to do is build our capacity from within train these individuals but also hold on to these individuals so by doing this and looking at the
21:36salary ranges i feel that we'll be able to build a team that will continue to build the foundation that we've laid in the last few years and to allow the department to basically become self-sufficient we rely on some contracted employees right now and some vendor help with these new positions that you as a group have already approved now getting the salaries aligned i think that will be in
22:00very good shape to become much more self-sufficient internally any questions bailey no so i only had one basically a comment that i'm assuming that you all have worked on this relative to what other people are getting outside and as well as in internally like positions in the different departments so what you're recommending is within budget within the next year's budget as well as
22:28taking into consideration what somebody gets and different correct you know sometimes i think we make decisions in one thing and we don't realize well if we pay this person this with this credential then we don't realize it's creating a domino effect so anytime we look at matrixes and all this i think we need to look at the whole district which we haven't always done not so much in your department but i
22:49think you understand what i'm saying and so if that's what this is i support it we need to keep people and um i'll just once again reiterate that i believe that a lot of these positions should be union positions and i think there's work being done to check that out but i would ask that you consider continue to do that because to me they need to be um you meet your physicians as well we
23:12actually um mr coogan and i met with um freaa to discuss some of them um we're looking at uh if some of them would fit in there i think that scott and i have had many discussions about that um a lot of these positions are 12-month positions where we specifically want them as s-nons because they're they're going to have to have a flat more flexible schedule right and really um a lot of it is they're managing
23:40programs or equipment software not necessarily people but we are looking at those that may fit into that and see where they fit so we are looking at that my only comment on that is any contract that any position that becomes part of the union all areas of that are part of the new matrix the new thing so what you just described 100 can happen in the union contract as well so they're not locked
24:09into certain different things so we have a contract there's a people have a right to you know be in a union but all of those things which i agree with flexibility 12-month employees this that can happen in the union i think there's been a lot of in this district statements in the past about well this is not a union position oh that can't be done because this doesn't no that's not the case at all
24:30the positions get bargained with this is a 12 month employee with x amount of like all of that stuff can happen in the union i want that publicly on the record that when i say this is a union it's not the pigeonhole you or anybody else that can happen so people keep on saying no no it's not it's not it can because we have other unions that have people in it that have no
24:52the name doesn't make you know just because it's the administrators association doesn't mean that they have to be an administrator in a school so we think that in the administrators association but then we have a teachers association that has all kinds of positions that aren't teacher positions so i just want it to be fair and equitable for everybody and sometimes it helps to have a matrix in the contract
25:12versus the individual contract so you're actually an employee you've got long-term stability and on a one-year contract so when we talk about wanting to keep people some of having them in a union means that they're going to have stability they're going to have long-term they're going to understand it so we keep on saying let's give these guys a one year contract if you ask me to give you a one year contract and his
25:31place is giving me a union contract for five or ten grand more or even equal money i'm going to the other job so i'm not just trying to say like let's put people in the union to box anybody in a corner it it'll help with stability it'll help with people being retained and then every time that we negotiate a contract with that entire union we will address these every year
25:53and that's like we do it at a meeting like willy nilly so i i think we're all on the same page of trying it so i do appreciate it but we need our vote to refer this to the full committee ocean 34 motion made by miss larabee second by mr bailey hall fall in favor and the last comment is 3.04 chromebook data all right let me preface the conversation by you know stating that
26:23this is a work in progress over the last 18 months we have ingested many chromebooks into the environment we are starting to lay the foundation in the frameworks for policies and procedures with the chromebooks you know when i was brought in as cio i took some time to overlook and see how things ran and i can say that you know maria and i have had many conversations at length and we have the vision for
26:50where we'd like to proceed with the chromebook um i guess initiative one-to-one initiative but again there are going to be road bumps and hiccups what i can tell you is on the last page of that document over the course of the last 18 months 1336 chromebooks were deemed either unrepairable by damage accident there may have been some malicious damage or also when you have a chromebook there's a life expectancy
27:20it's six to eight years so a lot of these devices that have gone to greener pastures now were some of the first chromebooks that we bought eight years ago i can say that when it says sent out to agi repair we brokered a deal with this company they send us the packaging material we send them the old chromebook they then frankenstein whatever parts that can be used out of that device
27:44not our manpower free of charge they take apart whatever device you know pieces that we need but then also they give us a kitty so for example a used chromebook screen may be worth fifteen dollars on the open market they give us a seven dollar credit so now with these newer chromebooks the parts are more expensive i now have a real-time kitty that i can purchase parts from and get overnighted
28:07to me so if i have a student that breaks the screen i now have the flexibility of getting parts quicker so as we over the course of this summer start to de-provision and retire some of these older devices the process will now be that they'll get boxed up and sent to this company so that we can a maybe get some of the parts from that device for ourselves i'm not
28:28paying the manpower on it but also build a kitty to get parts quicker the one part that we see that dies the most are the power supplies they're expensive kevin and i have had conversation off you know off the record about power supplies in schools i'll have a kitty now that i can get them instantaneously i don't have to go through the po process you know the procurement process because now i
28:51have an open kitty with this company and that's all they do so that was huge to be able to work on that with that company it's actually helping our techs tremendously as well first page of the document is just the number of student chromebooks that we have i will say if you look at our enrollment numbers some of them look a little bit ballooned that is because also we have in the
29:11districts and labs what are called chrome bases so it's a screen that's a chromebook that's used in a lab used in a classroom might also be used in an office it's stored in that container in the google classroom in the google console so those numbers may look a little bit ballooned in some of those areas and also you're going to notice that some of our spheres that we earmark for mcas testing a net testing
29:34they're also sitting in those containers so you know talbot lord for example you know 1290 i think they have their enrollment is not 1290 it's not close but they have a group of about 300 machines that are readily available in the building at any time so those numbers also will fluctuate there's probably about 20 in those numbers that will be retired at the end of this school year we have
29:58just under 2 000 spares on hand at the district stockpile and we have another 2400 on order my game plan is to take smaller buildings i.e a tansy a watson even a silvia remove devices in the summer replace with new devices then go through those devices from those buildings whatever are deemed ready to go back out cleaned up reconditioned whatever or not be sent off to agi repair and retired we're
30:28going to get into the process in the next two week every year kevin and i can maria will budget in that we're going to be replacing these devices because again chromebooks have an end of life expectancy between six and seven years uh also in the process just as a aside working on some more emergency connectivity funds they just released a new window i have a few weeks to work on that my plan is to again
30:52purchase more chromebooks so that we can start to swap out these devices the one piece that is nice just for the committee and the public certification is a chromebook has a license when you initially purchase that chromebook you purchased the license it's about thirty dollars for the license when you de-provision a device you do not lose that license so as i'm buying new devices we've de-provisioned
31:14just under 1400 devices i have 1400 licenses that when i purchase more chromebooks i do not have to purchase those licenses so there is a cost taping next page is staff devices we've worked very diligently over the course of covid to replace many of the staff devices with chromebooks i will say this lesson learned when it comes to chromebooks for teachers they are basically a cell phone with a
31:40keyboard and a screen so a lot of what we're seeing now is that the machine doesn't keep up with the computing power that a teacher needs to stream to the you know the tv in the classroom to run a google meet at the same time if needed to word process and to email so we have been internally um we've actually earmarked some of the emergency connectivity fund money from this past
32:02year to start replacing some of these teacher devices with windows based machines we're going to follow the model that we put in place at the high school and you'll see that at the high school promethean board hovercam windows-based laptop for teacher that's what we're going to do now across the district my goal in the department and for the district is to be able to standardize our devices from k to 12
32:27that way everything is the same it becomes more efficient for us it makes everything easier as far as professional development and we can have a stockpile so if your machine dies i can get you a machine that day no longer waiting so on the chromebook side for staff lesson learned plan there is in the summer as we replace these machines with windows based machines these become spares for
32:49buildings they get reconditioned same process whatever can't be used agi repair whatever else does not we have spares next page is the bills program i can get very granular with the numbers for you guys in this category because we have a technician that is assigned to that building 24 7. they're there all the time so if a chromebook comes in it is damaged or if it goes out the technician is there and aware of it
33:18what i can say about the repairs you'll see that some buildings have more repairs than others samsung has been backlogged so a lot of these devices that are out for repair are sitting on a workbench at samsung waiting on repair what we've done on the district level is maria and tracy had asked me to backfill those buildings with district devices so that way a student would not be without a device in
33:43those buildings so you can see that there are a substantial number of loaners on hand at morton that was also because at for mcas they're testing the whole building at the same time so we needed to make sure that they had the spares so at any point in the villes program we're actually back filling devices with non-lte devices so that the building has the chromebooks that they need daily
34:08we are getting to the point in the chromebook program that some of the samsung devices we're seeing systematic issues batteries are one big example samsung is working with us on that all the batteries seem to have been going at the same time and it's by lot number so you're going to notice that cuss that we're a hundred so samsung makes a batch of chromebooks one month they make a
34:28batch of chromebooks the next month it's all by that lot number and for some reason morton's lot number was about three months ago they were very high on repairs it has since leveled off because it replaced most of the batteries now it's custer's turn because it was in that age where the battery was gonna fail and if i had to forecast talbot's next because they're in that lot number so what we're doing
34:50is we're replacing with district devices right now and as soon as the device comes back student gets their bills device back learned a lot from the bills program as far as just the in and out and the repair process we've talked at length about the new incident iq software it was not being used to its full potential we've had some shifts with employees in the department and some technicians
35:18i have an all-star person working on that now so now the plan moving forward is at every ville school there will be a little check-in and check-outs in check-in and check out station at the main office where if i'm a student and i forget my chromebook i'm going to be able to go up to that device scan my id card i'll be assigned another chromebook but it's going to track for us now so if
35:39i have repeat offenders and we've started to roll that information into incident iq and the plan will be moving forward i'd like to roll it out to the high school next okay the middle the elementary schools i am not sold on running that and pushing that out there yet because they're not taking those devices home they're using them in the classrooms right now so if we get to a point where they stop moving back and
36:01forth we will however if you're an elementary school student next year what's going to happen is you're going to be assigned x chromebook for the year it'll be labeled right now what happens in most of the elementary schools they have 30 devices in the classroom and the kids grab one from their stations and then they go work at the device because we're not going back and forth but in the
36:21future what i'd like to do is we've talked about it with id cards every student's gonna have their id card they're gonna check out their device and moving forward we're gonna have some real um control over the chromebook piece you know it's a work in progress there are gonna be hiccups we're learning from those hiccups you guys have approved the digital device policy and that will allow us to
36:46as administration work with the building administration to hold people responsible not just students but staff members as well but i just wanted to give you guys an overview of numbers at the high school i can tell you roughly we've had about 480 repairs this year and about 49 to 52 devices were destroyed okay some of those were by accident you know it was in my bag i dropped it on the
37:17floor it shattered some of those were not as a district and you know as the cio i need to do a better job to make sure that my people um communicate with the building administration and hold the students and the staff responsible and that's something that we're working on internally and you know i won't sleep until we know that the process is down but i just ask that you know that
37:38on the technology side we're starting to lay that foundation and i'm hopeful that this time october november that we can come to you and say that yeah we're going to have broken devices but we're going to hold people responsible and there's going to be a much better system and process in place any questions miss laramie so scott i i respect all the work i can imagine how much work would it exist and it's still
38:10moving forward going to be um this is a heavy task um and i appreciate everybody's uh efforts um like i mentioned last meeting the repeat offender you know i kind of brought that up and i didn't i could tell that you know just by using a card we'll be able to have a better grasp on the new speed offender because let's face it uh some we may get taken advantage of we know
38:35that right we know that so um i don't i mean i don't have a problem with any of this i really don't have any questions but uh uh i admire the work that you guys put into this because this is not easy so uh with that i yield any more questions maybe in the next week or two i'll just reach out thank you thank you mr bailey um extremely uh thorough presentation i
39:00really appreciate it um my question is strictly on um the batteries how you spoke um kind of how you know morton had a high rate out for repairs and now we're looking at costs is that something that samsung takes care of or something that we pay for so right now we're still on the warranty stage with the bills program next school year is going to be our last year under the warranty process after next year we
39:28own those devices bumper to bumper okay up until this point they're replacing i had actually reached out to samsung and said listen you guys are killing me i need these devices back if i go out and buy aftermarket batteries and have my technicians replace in-house what does that look like and the guy said absolutely not because as soon as you open that device you own the device so
39:47that's why i could turn these devices around i could get from a supplier i could get batteries but i don't want to do that because then i'm going to own those devices and they'll be out of the warranty process no i definitely get that i'm just i and i know kovitz affected obviously um you know the the volume and um us getting things back but um i don't know it was just a question
40:09right now i have nothing to do with you like the the volume of of laptops that we do buy i don't see why you would have that many faulty and you just won't replace them um it's just a comment more than anything and just to give you a little more background information on it so those kids are using them all day long in school so they're not trickle charging the devices like they should be they're
40:28charging them overnight they're letting them sit overnight and samsung it's a design floor on samsung's side and they're owning up to it and they're replacing them yeah plus it comes with the data package so they're using the data at home also yeah when um when when you so their device breaks they're using our devices though right so here we are samsung like the villas program is saying
40:52oh we're going to take care of this for years but if it takes a year to get the spots then they're using our device for a year where is bill's to give us the money for the year that our device is now a year older well it's not a whole year it's not taking a year to do that but i know i know what you're saying we're waiting six months in some instances and when you sign
41:12again no one in this room signed the original bills contract but when you look at the contract there is language in there that says if chromebook goes out for repair if you don't have enough in your fleet for loner from the verizon device you are to supply a device so going into this so how many did they give us extra they do not give you percentage it's a percentage based on the initial
41:36enrollment and what happens is every year if your enrollment goes up they supply you with a gap order so every year you may get 17 25 new devices because you're you're that certain amount is going to break they don't give us any extra no so you know i said it at the last meeting i think at some point we need to do our own thing well it at a time to expire
42:03you know i've had a lot of complaints about bill's stuff getting out on um for months then i see there's 135 loans at martin there's been times there was no loners at one and they were giving kids not even giving kids computers to give home but they give homework like to see now 135 it's odd so so kevin just so you know there again some of those numbers are based off of sending district devices for mcas
42:30testing so they have spares but also there's been some movement in some of these buildings with technicians that no longer work for us so it wasn't done correctly until some of these people have been brought on and they're cleaning up the process from within um goes back to the matrix when we opened up this piece the grant piece would only pay for so much of a position now we're putting the people in place
42:56that we need and they're cleaning up the process no i get it and it's not to place blame or anything it's just it's a system that wasn't working properly so when i look at the bills or the school like you had mentioned henry lord has 1200 of 1290 and then you add 305 so they're gonna show they've got 1500 devices in that place no so if you look at it so now that's 305 pills devices okay
43:23so that's also included in that larger number because it's part of the container that the chromebook lives in so the first page has bills included correct it's a total number yes and don't forget that's a k to eight so it's only gonna have it's only six seven and eight for verizon program great and again if you have a lab of 40 desktops if you have a spare car that influ that makes the number go up
43:50we can i'm just looking at the numbers now yeah front page says martin has under that foot 8 15. when we slip to bills morton has 944 so the number is actually 130 more than what's on the original page which is supposed to incorporate so what is probably happening there is the chromebook number for students were told and it fluctuates daily because if it goes in or out for repair it comes out
44:14of the system um and these numbers were pulled on different days just to give you guys an idea i get what you're you're on track so i'm not giving you out of time my concern and it's because i i believe strongly that we need to hold schools accountable we need to hold students accountable we need to hold the teachers accountable and staff we need all the parents accountable i had i
44:33don't think we've had control as i said at the last meeting of what they have and if you just like you said oh a kid took his bag put it in his bag and then threw it on the ground and some people might think that's an accident i don't consider that an accident i think that is you're not taking care of your device so if that breaks because you threw it on the ground then you pay
44:54or your parents pay is me personally to speak for myself because if we just keep on giving we don't have the money like right now we have a pretty good budget but this is going to teach lessons that you have to take care of your stuff and if we look at it we need a case do we need a better case is it worth a case that's all something for
45:13you to figure out but when i look at the front page what i'm going to ask for is more granular numbers on what has been happening to the devices so i don't want to pinpoint one school versus the other but you should know the district should know the principal the school should know we've gotten to 400 chromebooks this year we've attached any rules regulations or we just keep on you break it we give you another one
45:41that's what i'm looking for is to get a summary of that for the whole committee so that we can get a handle on what happens because if mrs ponce is the principal of one school and is holding a tight ship in a tight line out of the thing and mr aggie has a principle of another school and says you know what we just have the money we'll give you another one that's not fair
45:58it's not right it's not fair and it's not teaching similar lessons across all the schools and i do think that that's what's happening across this district i don't think we're consistent with what we have some of these numbers are staggering one of the middle schools is just one yes just totally staggering and that is a major problem which i'll show you gonna address but i do appreciate the info
46:22this is another one of um when we get that like i said the monthly dashboard type thing this would be a good setup of how we're doing with some of these data so not for next month but as we get going the whole committee once a month could get a nice dashboard up here's what uh curriculum is looking like here's what i usage just look like his with our chromebook said and it's actually going
46:43to show people we've got thousands of devices going through here we've got all kinds of how many email addresses and emails we're sending so we need to show the committee and the public we have all this stuff going on that's going to justify the matrix and all this this year because what happens i think people don't understand the enormity of the technology that we're dealing with so
47:03then oh you're spending more you're given more positions so it's just i think a good synergy my last question though is on the chromebook and this issue came up with an issue with the kid that posted something inappropriate at durfee but i think it's important to address like what as much as we can within the law of what what happened with that like was that a chromebook that that the kids on like you know because
47:26they're on their devices so okay do they the kids our kids my question would be one is what happened generally and two is what is the policy in the district about how many devices kids can bring to school okay so i can talk on the technology piece and all of maria talk about the rest the incident that is making its rounds on social media was a student was able to create a
47:50handshake with a device that streams our digital um bulletin board that fred tv runs school information using their phone using their phone so what happened was it's called airdrop okay they air dropped to the device in looking at it it's been rectified airdrop has been turned off however those devices were new to the district and that setting was buried in settings that we weren't aware of
48:20bottom line we weren't aware of and i will tell all of you i've been in the technology realm for 25 years there are kids out there that are just they're geniuses when it comes to this stuff they just can figure it out lesson learned devices have been locked they're no longer able to get on when it comes to us and that was with a private cell phone that was not anything to do with our
48:42network it was literally bluetooth from device to device okay when it comes to a school device our devices are locked down via the google console and relay by lightspeed so everything is filtered to sipa compliance locked out everything is safe i will say that we've had some issues with the wireless networks at the high school in the past week we shut the guest network off because there were some issues the principal
49:08felt that there were some issues we created a staff guest network so that the teachers could connect they could get text that bullying is difficult with cell phones we had another security breach in that network so right now there are only two networks running in the building student and staff over the last 48 hours we've been watching the student network has some holes in it over the next day or two
49:29we're going to be changing things um bottom line is it's a monster there are kids out there that can kind of penetrate test the network with the addition of some of these positions i'm gonna be able to better contain some of that stuff because right now it's it's it's myself i'm acting as the director of the department the cio and a technician right now because we're down some technicians so it's very
49:57difficult to keep a stronghold on that our network is safe but we've learned things over the last 24 to 48 hours but i can assure that the incident that we're talking about was not network related it was literally i take my cell phone hey look at that i see something and then we're gonna have a blast with it it can no longer happen the gentleman in this room is the one that figured it out behind me
50:21he spent a long time on it he's locked it down we're not gonna have any issues moving forward but what was play like was it a movie like mile to hold on it was a five second five second clip you said second five five seconds so it was like something popped up and then we addressed it right away immediately i think that's important to public meeting i want to let the public know everybody's honest about like
50:43what's this now if it's five seconds it's still you're on it it was a mistake i get it but it wasn't it wasn't a minute you know so i want that are you very clear to the public that it was a very limited type of situation that shouldn't have happened but it wasn't a long drawn-out thing and they didn't tap into our network they did not and also what i'd like to let
51:05the public know is as soon as the individual that worked on the system to begin with he got right in on it he was sending me screenshots via his cell phone because he was up on a lift looking at it because he was that concerned we were able to identify the name of the cell phone but then also for the education of the public our security system cameras that were in the
51:23cafeteria were able to zoom in on the screen so we could also see because when you airdrop it says so-and-so's iphone is connected to this tv so we're also able to use our security system to actually figure out who it was and i can't say that the school administration did an investigation based off of what was shown on the screen and the name some individuals came forward and talked about it the student admitted to
51:50doing what it was and then the building administration you know followed their course of discipline on the student anything bad no that it's being handled it was immediate it was not i know that there was some conflicting because yesterday even i uh a parent approached me and i said no it wasn't they had heard it was a 15-minute video and that's not the case as soon as it popped up it was
52:13immediately shut off yeah and alex was you can actually attest to that yeah i appreciate it i just wanted to bring it up because it's a technology meeting it just happened and i actually was wondering if it was the chromebook my other question was on what devices are allowed in the building so currently right now and it's something that i'd like to bring to a future technology meeting is during
52:34covid past administration had a byod policy bring your own device um that policy is still in effect there's some writing in the policy that says if a teacher wants to allow cell phones in a classroom they can it's it's very um it's an umbrella policy but it allows the buildings to have control over what devices are in and what devices are not um i'd like to moving forward for next school year i
52:59don't feel that there's a need for a byok policy we're a one-to-one district and we have control over those devices so to secure things i'd like moving forward to bring that policy in and i think we we sunset that policy i'll do you one better i don't believe that we have the policy that this committee ever voted on of bring your own device to the schools so i'd like to ask that it gets on the next
53:23agenda for the school committee that their policy in my opinion was never voted on by this committee this was uh sort of a person in charge just saying oh there's you know whatever it doesn't exist as far as i'm concerned we are paying for all these devices which we just talked about no student needs to be bringing in private devices ipads all of these other things it doesn't need to happen
53:47they need to control it and at this point as far as i'm concerned if you research it i don't even think you need to come to us that's a decision that you as the administrator can make to say effective may 10th or whatever the date is no more devices other than our own devices because i don't believe that we ever approve that policy as we uh talked about so if we didn't and we needed a
54:09change of the policy i'd ask that it be on the agenda so that we can do it because why wait till next year if we know it's not right we can control it better we should be able to control every single thing that happens in the in that school we have the program whatever it's called to monitor what the children are looking at and students are looking at during the day in the classrooms
54:29so that should be the only device available so now student is not paying attention student is doing something off task is that whatever we should be getting calls saying the kid is texting videos tick tock and all this other stuff no the only thing they can get on is what's there which is learning and school work so i'm personally in favor of let's let's get this straightened out right now let's not waste that idea
54:54and we will look at it because that's something we have to uh explore so i would say let's put it on the agenda whatever you feel is needed even if it's open anything let the full committee debate it and go over but i definitely think uh we need to start under letting people understand that schools for education now for this nonsense that they want to continue to do i'll work on that any other questions on
55:18the new business no but i'm glad you did bring that up miss again i didn't think we were gonna have a chance but i i would have i liked the clarity part of it um and just letting the public know that it wasn't a 10-minute issue and the school was on it uh very quickly and the the appropriate measures are being taken so i i'm glad we did discuss it
55:44and get it out there and uh um that's all and i do i i think if we need to revisit the policy on on on i don't know all that technology uh we need to do it then if something needs to be adjusted in the policy then we need to adjust it and bring it in front of the full committee i mean if mr cabral is saying that it goes class by class and the policy stating
56:11uh it doesn't then we have a small issue not a big issue but we just need to uh um address you know as a full committee so with that i yield i agree so i entertain a motion to adjourn ms laravey makes a motion to return mr bailey seconds all in favor aye opposed so voted thank you very much have a great night great meeting