By KARI BLURTON
Hays Post
Hays USD 489 school board members and administration met Tuesday for a six-hour special meeting to discuss building reports from principals, and a presentation of the district’s technology plan and infrastructure needs — an issue all district principals agreed needed to be dealt with as soon as possible.
“(The current infrastructure) is all basic in what we have,” district Technology Director Brian Drennon said. “We need more sophisticated equipment to be able to do what we want.
“The current infrastructure can’t support all the district’s devices at any school. We just can’t; we have hardware limitations,” said Drennon, “It can barely get 25 people on and we start having problems.”
“It is old,” agreed Roosevelt Elementary Principal Lee Keffer. “The other day my whole system crashed.”
Both Hays High School Principal Marty Straub and Hays Middle School Principal Craig Pallister said hours of time is spent each week by teachers trying to log themselves or students into the system, causing loss of instruction time every day and in every class.
Drennon presented two plans he feels will help the district.
The first option includes a scaled-back, but much-improved, wireless infrastructure with an “access point” in every other room of each school building and added access points in “troubled areas.” That plan would cost approximately $160,000.
The second option, however, is a “ready for anything” approach with access points in every classroom, an option Drennon said would “ensure there are no capacity issues” in the future.
That plan is estimated to cost $200,000.
“Obviously, this stuff is needed.. … Infrastructure is common sense.,” said board member Lance Bickle. “It needs to be replaced.”
Board President Greg Schwartz agreed, but expressed concerns as to the cost.
“If we lived an ideal world,” he said, “we would buy everything in the world.”
School board members asked Drennon to send out requests-for-proposal , and the discussion will be put on the agenda for further discussion at a future school board meeting.
Drennon is also asking the board to consider a pilot program next year — BYOD (Bring Your Own Device.)
Drennon said he has talked to schools in Denver and New Hampshire, and the system appears to work well for students who have their own device and want to use it at school.
Drennon said he would first need the infrastructure for BYOD to work, but would like the chance to survey students who have their own device asking them if they would be interested in using it at school. He proposed adding a question to the online enrollment form for the 2014-15 school year.
A presentation by Superintendent Dean Katt regarding an overview of the district’s budget and a board self-evaluation were both canceled due to time constraints.
The meeting ended at 11 p.m., an hour longer than planned.
Katt said the budget review will be rescheduled for 6:30 p.m. June 2 school board meeting at Rockwell Administration Building. Another retreat agenda item — the board self-evaluation — will be rescheduled for a yet-to-be-determined date.