Those who forget the past

...are doomed not to learn anything at all from it.

Hey, remember how the Worcester Public Schools had a 2014 Blue Ribbon Technology review?

Remember how one of the things we found (if we didn't already know) was an advantage of Worcester's size was that we were able to do things in-house?
That rather than pay and pay and pay for outsourcing, and have to wait and tolerate whatever the vendors decided, we pay actual employees who work for us and do what we want (like when we added paying for school lunches online)?

One of the things that has been rather...marked...under the current administration is an ignorance--professed or real--to anything that happened before. And so I suppose one should not be surprised to see among the proposed costs for the FY20 budget is student data outsourcing (p. 10 in the text, p. 17 online):

...provides an Information Technology Implementation Coordinator (funded to start at halfway through the fiscal year) to support the bid, selection, transition, and implementation of a third-party student information system (including online grading and parent portal) to be purchased in 2020-21 and implemented in 2021-22 school year. This budget also reflects $30,000 for a temporary district-wide online grading module that can be used while the district transitions to the integrated student information system.

There has not, of course, been a cost-benefit analysis done of outsourcing student data; those costs are generally per pupil, which for a district the size of Worcester quickly becomes substantial. The current fixation on online grading not only ignores the extent to which this is already happening (raise your hands, parents, if you already get access to your children's grades online), it does not take into account what always previously had been postulated as the main roadblock, that it might be considered a change in working conditions and thus open for collective bargaining.

This is thus a nearly perfect storm of ignoring work already done, ignoring prior raised concerns that still have not been dealt with, missing the places in which the purported issue has already been dealt with, and failing to built on something that is actually a strength of the system.

This is less about the $30,000 + the half year salary (I can't tell how much, as it doesn't go into that level of detail) for this year: this is about moving ahead to tie the district to a change in how student information is managed without doing the necessary homework, including how much this is going to cost, not only in time, but also in advantage.

This is just not smart.

Finance: update on technology

Update from administration on the Blue Ribbon Technology report
the report's not up online yet, but will be; I'll link once it is.
"as we prepare the FY15 budget, the most notable aspect you'll see is the increase of funds needed for the lease of our computers" as it is a full year this year (rather than a half year as it was for FY14)
technology has been "a lion's share of capital funds" over the past few years
network infrastructure and wireless infrastructure
"background information on developing the software applications in house" and how much we save by doing so
Walton: software development by writing computer code to make a computer do something

Parent Portal offline for next few weeks

or why IT people are important and we need more of them!

If you have recently gone over to the WPS Parent Portal to add money to your child's school lunch account, you've discovered that it's offline.

Don't worry! It's temporary, and it's for excellent reasons.

If you aren't a WPS employee, you may never have heard of SAGE, which is the system through which information is managed by the Worcester Public Schools. I can't do it justice*, but suffice to say: it was written in house, it has saved us an enormous amount of money, and because it's ours, we can change it as we need to.
(which is how we could add the Parent Portal)
Like all such things, though, SAGE grew creaky and needed updating. That happened this past summer. We've had people working ridiculously long hours so most of this could get done before we had to get everything back up and running for the start of school.
The debugging part of that is still going on.
At the same time, our school nutrition system also needed updating.
Then, we need to get those two systems to talk to each other to make the online lunch payment bit work.

We have our (understaffed; our new person hasn't come on yet!) IT department working full throttle on this, but it's going to take a few weeks before this all shakes out and the software vendor (for the nutrition program) gets enough systems online to reach critical mass.
The hope is that we're back online for the end of September.

In the meantime, school lunch costs $1.65 this year, so set aside your change!


*my explanation here is probably giving the IT department hives