By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

IT Supervisor Kat Beebee gave an update on the state of Benicia Unified School District equipment and online access last week to the school board. She also submitted a tech plan for the district to follow going forward.

That blueprint, which was approved unanimously, will be especially important in Beebee’s absence, as this week is her last with BUSD.

“I’ve been working on this for months, in getting all of this compiled together,” said Beebee, who is joining another district.

She said among the chief tech concerns: while the district’s main Internet pipe has been increased from 10 megabytes to 50, the pipe at Benicia High School is still 10 megabytes and “they’re pushing the envelope.”

The age of the district’s computers is also a concern, Beebee said: Seventy-six percent are more than five years old. “Over five years old, I used to always consider disposable,” she said.

She pointed out that when she took over, the district had 1,400 computers. “I just did a complete count, and it’s about 1,000. So we’ve lost about 400 computers since the last count. So they are rapidly dropping out,” she said.

The servers are not in much better shape, Beebee said. According to her report, the core servers in the district are old and beginning to fail rapidly. Hard drives have been failing over the past few months, and hardware failures are occurring at what she characterized as an alarming rate.

“We’re keeping everything together as best we can, but it’s going to have to be replaced pretty quickly. It is failing, and it is failing pretty rapidly.”The district’s needs come at a heavy price. The estimate for server hardware, necessary software, network reconfiguration, new computers and wireless would run about $752,600 using today’s values of products and services, Beebee said.

Beebee said the results of an anonymous electronic survey of district staff found that 76 percent wanted to see more IT training. She said the survey also found strong support for improved wireless Internet capability. “Wireless — everybody wants wireless,” she said. “I do, too. But we have to get our infrastructure in place to support wireless.”

One problem, she said, is that people are trying to create wireless in the classrooms themselves. “People are bringing in their iPads and they want to use them for instruction,” she said. “Instruction is no longer tethered.”

This leads up to many concerns, she said. For one thing, there are no backups to the antiquated servers that were repurposed, and there are compliancy issues that need to be addressed.

“Do we sacrifice security of the system if we use wireless at the high school?” board President Rosie Switzer asked.

The problem, Beebee said, is “$79 specials from Fry’s is what a lot of the teachers are doing, and they’re sneaking them in to their rooms. But they’ve taken down our whole network and they’ve opened it up for security. It’s dangerous,” she said.

“It’s kind of reminiscent of when people were bringing in the space heaters and trying to circumvent the system,” Switzer said.

“You bring up a good point about the wireless,” Trustee André Stewart said. “We can’t get rid of the textbooks if we don’t have wireless. I’m all for textbooks, but they’re expensive.”

Sharing is caring!