Town, Schools, Present Plan to Address School IT Issues

The School Committee and Stephen Maio, Wakefield’s town administrator, discussed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) at Tuesday night's School Committee meeting on how to fix the Wakefield School System’s IT situation.

The MOU, which was crafted by vice chairman Tom Markham, III, lays out a plan to solve the current IT system’s flaws by highlighting who will be accountable when a particular issue arises, what will be done, and will there be people around.

The plan also includes a new position, the educational technology administrator, whose job would be to serve as the school department’s IT representative. In essence, the educational technology administrator would be someone who has knowledge of curriculum and technology, and would be sensitive to the needs of the teachers and the realities of the classroom. 

Who will solve what problems?
One of the biggest failures of the existing IT system has been the lack of a quick tech response to simple problems. If a printer breaks or an email won’t send, the response is the same as if the entire network melts down and crashes: Fill out a ticket or a work order and wait for someone to get back to you.

Under the new system, there will be a multi-leveled chain of response for requests, depending on the severity of the issue. For the most mundane matters, a designated troubleshooter will be on site to help alleviate the problem immediately.

“Each school will have its own Level One troubleshooter, which is going to be done, I believe, via a stipend,” Maio said. “That is you’re initial line of defense and probably 80 percent of the issues can be handled right there, having that person in the building all the time, someone who has a little bit of tech savvy, knowing what to do will resolve a lot of those problems. At least people will know where to go in the building, it is a very frustrating issue.”

For problems too complicated for the Level One troubleshooter, the next step in the process would be to call the area technician. There will be two area technicians, each one serving a specific set of schools.

“These will be people who are a little more tech knowledge, that will be in the area of the schools,” Maio said. “If they cannot resolve the incident, that’s when we will get into the dreaded ticketing system.”

Maio said that the ticketing system, which has proven to be "horribly inefficient and unfeasible" in a classroom setting, will be revamped to improve its usability. He acknowledged that it is difficult for a second grade teacher, for example, to leave his or her classroom to fill out a ticket, but said that in the new system, most tech issues would hopefully be resolved by either the troubleshooter or the area technician, and ideally there would be much fewer instances where a ticket would be filled out at all.

For the most serious cases of tech failure, then the school could go through the formal work order process that is already in place now.

Wouldn’t it be great if…?
Another positive feature in the memorandum is a system of facilitating change. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could do ____?” a teacher might ask. Under the new system, the teacher could then go to the principal and the educational tech administrator to see if the idea is feasible.

If it is, then a discovery team could be formed by the town to find out “can we do it, how to do we do it or is there a way to do it better?” Within two weeks, that team would then have to come back to the town with its findings, cost estimates and recommendations. At that point, the Superintendent would have to decide if the initiative is worth pursuing further.

“I think it’s a great process and a great way of getting things done,” Maio said. “There are a lot of teachers and people who are interested in the school system that have come up with great ideas. And how they were being implemented along the way, sometimes we stumbled, things were not done correctly, and this really sets up a nice process.”

Work in progress
The Committee will not vote on the MOU until a later meeting, as many of the committee members had suggestions for changes they wanted to see made before signing off on it.

Cheryl Ford raised a concern that the MOU made no mention of what help would be available during off-hours and weekends.

“If a teacher needs to do something at night and can’t get onto the system, what’s the process going to be for something like that?” Ford asked

Ford also said that the educational technology administrator should report to the Superintendent of Schools in addition to the IT Director. Other members of the committee echoed that sentiment, asking for clarification on who particular people who report to.

Committee member Anne Danehy also expressed concern about having the troubleshooter, who would be a teacher, be taken away from the classroom to deal with another teacher’s problems. She asked if it would be better to have all the teachers taught how to solve some of the simpler problems, so that one teacher isn’t always running around the building unjamming computers.

In order to better facilitate the process of integrating the new system should it be approved, the committee asked Maio if IT Director David Knox or another IT representative could attend future School Committee meetings to help the process run smoothly. Maio said that could be done.