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Technology should be shared between school and town |
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Thursday, 07 May 2009 |
BY ABBY FOX
Wendy Schmidle, the town’s information technology director, asked the town council Monday night to help push along her request that more town and school technology expenses are shared.
“We need to look at how the money is being spent,” she said the next day. “I know there’s duplication.”
East Greenwich town and school divisions don’t discuss technology needs together and that needs to change, she argued. “Between the school and the town, we spent close to $one million on technology and that’s a lot of money.”
That million isn’t being stretched enough, she said, if the town is in a situation where school children use technology in the home that’s “way beyond what’s delivered in schools,” while on the town side, a lot of employees still aren’t trained in the newer technology; many are still faxing and copying paper, for instance, when they could be scanning and emailing.
“What is the problem?” she asked. “It’s not the money.” The problem, she suggested, is that there’s no technology steering committee uniting both sides.
If people from the town side and from the school side got together and planned a “long-term strategy,” she said, than everyone would know what’s coming in the budget, how it’s going to be paid for and the savings that would be found. One obvious example is the fiber optic cable Schmidle has been in charge of for the town buildings, which by proximity ended up including Eldredge School. (Fiber optics replace more expensive T1 phone lines.) Frenchtown School is the next school to be included on the fiber optic cable, but later, what about Hanaford School and the new middle school, she asked.
What makes progress on this uncertain, she said after the meeting, is “I’m not sure how comfortable they [the school district] are with the whole concept. Jerry [Nettik, the schools’ IT director] and I have talked,” but at this point, “for the school and town to work together, that’s a dramatic change, and you can’t do it from the bottom up; it has to come from the top down,” – hence her presentation.
The school district is facing a cut this year, or more specifically, a “decrease in their increase,” in the budget, she said, yet it seems “the district doesn’t want to see the budget cut, period, while the town is cutting the budget. Because that dynamic still exists, this is a big change.”
Because of good, stable economic times up until recently, East Greenwich “isn’t used to being innovative; they’re used to being reactive,” she said, and that attitude has to come to an end.
When Schmidle stepped down from the podium, Town Council President Michael Isaacs spoke for the council that “the council is interested in pursuing this,” and asked Schmidle for “more information and concrete suggestions, with numbers attached.”
School Committee Chair Jean Ann Guliano said the next day that “We’re on board with” Schmidle’s suggestions and said the school committee still hasn’t decided what its doing with the superintendent’s and Nettik’s suggestion to hire a technology district to help the district prioritize their needs. To be continued.
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