School Board Switches Focus to Technology

The infrastructure that supports technology at ’s 56 schools is crumbling, the board of trustees learned at a special meeting Wednesday.

The update came from Susan Holliday, executive director of technology and information services, during a special meeting of the board. At the board’s next meeting, scheduled for Monday, the staff is recommending the district lease new equipment to replace old and failing routers and switches.

The board will also discuss Monday having a .

“We want the students to have the best access we can and have them be technologically savvy,” said Gary Pritchard, a college professor and vice president of the board. “I do believe textbooks will be going to tablets. If we’re not ready to accept that, we’re going to be doing a disservice to our students.”

The district’s network that allows teachers and students alike to connect to the Internet and important databases is composed of more than 13,000 computers and other devices—such as iPod iTouches—and more than 1,000 “hardware pieces,” such as the routers and switches, Ron Lebs, deputy superintendent of business and support services, wrote in a report to the board.

The schools are connected across South Orange County via fiber optics, which Holliday likened to a 10-lane interstate highway. But the information sent then hits a bottleneck at the school sites, where the equipment is more akin to a “dirt road in South Dakota,” Holliday said.

At 24 of the 56 school sites—43 percent—switches for the main distribution facilities, or the central hub for each school, are more than 10 years old and need replacing.

Each building or large wing also has a smaller hub, called the intermediate distribution facility, where 45 percent of the switches districtwide are more than a decade old, Leb's report states. The predicted life for all these switches is five to seven years.

“To upgrade, sustain and support the district network infrastructure could require up to $775,000 annually,” Lebs write in the report. “Considering current fiscal restraints, this is not possible, but progress is still being made in allocating necessary fiscal resources to address network needs.”

Holliday said in recent years, the district has only been replacing the needed switches and routers as they fail. But when they do, that means a day’s worth of downtime for a school. Seven of the district’s 58 main distribution facilities failed in the last year alone.

To just replace the oldest of the switches and routers would cost $2.3 million—and that’s taking advantage of once-a-year deep discounts, Holliday said. However, lease options, for either $1 million a year for three years or $500,000 for six years, are available. She’s recommending the six-year lease and acknowledged that more equipment will have to be replaced in coming years.

Despite , Capo is still facing a $. In the past five years, the district has already cut more than $90 million from its budget, leaving no much left to trim.

As part of Capo's proposed 2011-12 budget, $400,000 has been targeted to address technology network needs. The district spent only $80,000 in this area this year, Lebs wrote.