School Committee: Town IT Performing At Unacceptable Level For Schools

Good technical support has been hard to come by in the Wakefield school system, according to a report presented at Tuesday’s School Committee meeting, which found that 70 percent of those surveyed said that the current information technology (IT) system needs improvement or is unacceptable.

“This report isn’t good,” said Anthony Guardia, school committee member. “When our primary service is nine months long, September to June, and the average response time is one month, that’s unacceptable.”

David Knox, the town’s information technology director, submitted the report to the school committee. As the committee noted, the report had no good news, and was very candid about the reality of the situation.

The most striking comment in his report, however, was the statement that the IT department did not have the manpower to deliver the services that the school department was requesting, and that they should “recalibrate your expectations.”

“That’s not going to happen,” said Tom Markham III, vice chairman of the school committee.

The school committee bemoaned the long wait times for work orders to be handled by the town IT department, who handles such requests after a consolidation was undertaken a couple of years ago to improve efficiency and cut costs. The results show that efficiency hasn’t been reached, and the frustration is beginning to reach a boiling point within the school department.

Evidently, the problems won’t be fixed any time soon.

“I read the comment here that says the overall performance of service request processing will not be met next year,” said Chris Callanan, school committee member. “That’s so unacceptable I don’t even know where to begin.”

Callanan went on to say that consolidation had failed, and that the school department would be better off going back to its old system, where the schools had its own IT department. As things stand now, he said, there is frustration at every level of the school system, and teachers have stopped trying to fix the problems that continuously arise.

“I remember when we first talked about consolidating, and a lot of people were hesitant, and the comment was made that ‘we’ll give it a try, see if it works, if it doesn’t we can always go back,’” Callanan said. “I’m personally ready to go back.”

The town IT department currently oversees the handling of all official data in the town of Wakefield, including data handled by town hall, the police, the light department and the schools.

For the schools, the technical problems vary, but many are reoccurring issues that collectively add a great deal of frustration and disruption to the classroom. One notable example are blocked websites, the schools currently block most websites, making exceptions for acceptable ones.

Kevin Piskadlo, a school committee member, asked why the policy couldn’t just be to keep the system open, and then block disruptive websites? That way, teachers could find and utilize informative material online without being blocked unfairly by a firewall, while still keeping websites like Facebook off limits.

Superintendent Joan Landers said that a system of prioritizing IT work orders was being worked on, but so far had not yet materialized.

Callanan also asked if Knox, or anyone else from the IT department, had been invited to the meeting, as he wasn’t present. According to Lisa Butler, chairman of the school committee, he wasn’t invited because she didn’t feel his being there would be productive, as it likely would have devolved into a shouting match and would not have been productive.

The committee decided to issue a memo of understanding to the appropriate parties in order to move in the right direction to finding a solution to the obvious problems in the school’s IT system.