If budget approved, work could begin over summer
John Tredrea
An advisory group of Hopewell Valley Regional School District teachers, media specialists and residents with high-tech expertise has recommended an “infrastructural upgrade” for the district’s computers and other high-tech equipment.
The recommendation was made Monday at the regular meeting of the Hopewell Valley Regional Board of Education.
Douglas Brower, district technology supervisor, said work on the infrastructural upgrade should begin as soon as possible. Much of it could be done over the summer, he said.
Superintendent Robert Sopko said, “We’ve been struggling with ‘intermediary’ media fixes that haven’t done the job … it’s time to wipe the slate clean on this … hopefully the budget will pass and we can start getting some of this work done.”
The advisory group said the upgrade is needed because it would largely solve the problem of too many computers and other electronic devices in schools becoming inoperative (“going down,” in computer lingo) too often, and staying down too long.
The upgrade also would improve substantially the performance of equipment when it’s up and running, expand on the ways it can be used, and increase cost-efficiency, the group said.
The proposed high-tech upgrade would cost between $550,000 and $700,000 and could be paid for over four years in a lease-purchase deal, Mr. Brower said.
Networking hardware and software would be purchased for the district’s three elementary schools, Timberlane Middle School and Central High School. Toll Gate Grammar School and Bear Tavern Elementary would be completely rewired. Portions of the other three schools would be re-wired and fiber-optic upgrades added throughout the district.
At Monday night’s school board meeting, the proposed upgrade was summarized for the board by Mr. Brower and Dennis Schmidt, the school district’s media services supervisor.
Mr. Brower said the infrastructure problems the district has are primarily the result of what he termed an understandable effort to keep costs down when, five years ago, the district began bringing at least six computers into every elementary classroom and buying other high-tech gear. Corners were cut on the installation of links, or networking, between all those devices, he said. “Our infrastructure was pieced together over the last five years,” he said. “It has no pre-planned design. Its reliability is in question, and it lacks the performance it needs to give our students what they need.”
Problems have been particularly severe at Bear Tavern, Messrs. Brower and Schmidt said. But they have been endemic throughout the district, particularly in the elementary schools and the portion of Central High School that would be rewired if the proposed upgrade is done.
“Computers and printers dropping off line” on a regular basis is a fact of life at Toll Gate Grammar, said that school’s media specialist, Carol Olson.
A similar report came from Sue Weinman, a teacher at Hopewell Elementary. “When you’re in the middle of a lesson in which you’re using computers with a group of young students, it’s a real problem when the computers suddenly go down,” she said.
Mr. Schmidt said the natural tendency of teachers continually faced with such disruptions is to begin reducing use of the equipment the district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy.
Mr. Brower added: “When we got started, it was easier to meet the students’ curricular needs by buying the computers and making financial cuts on the infrastructure. Now we need to bring that up to grade, too.”
Under the current system of computer networking in the schools, which Mr. Schmidt likened to a “daisy chain” the district keeps making longer as enrollment grows, high-tech gear in whole sections of a school regularly has to be shut off while a problem in one room is repaired. That would no longer occur if the upgrade was done, he said.
In the new system, a series of networking hubs would be installed in each school. If a high-tech machine went down in a classroom, a portable device into which it could be plugged would be brought into the room while the problem was rectified, and no other areas of the building would have to shut down while that work was being done.
Mr. Schmidt said the district’s technology team could quickly be made aware of problems with an automatic alert system that would include pagers or an e-mail program that would send messages on what the problem is and where it’s located.
In addition to reducing downtime significantly and making the district’s high-tech gear easier to use, the upgrade would enable the district to expand the use of that gear with multi-media approaches it can’t bring online today, Mr. Schmidt said.
The 10-member Tech 2000 Advisory Group recommending the upgrade was appointed last August by Mr. Brower, as directed by Superintendent Sopko. In addition to technology specialists from the schools and Messrs. Brower and Schmidt, the group includes district residents Jim Arbeiter and Michael Wagner, of North Shore Labs, and Chris Tengi, who works in the computer field at Princeton University. The group will continue to meet and develop recommendations on the district’s high-tech needs, Mr. Brower said.