In this section:

One School District's System Maintenance Program
Related Websites

 

 

One School District's System Maintenance Program

Describing a typical school district's method for maintaining its technology systems gives an overview of the day-to-day operations required to keep system tools in working order for their users. In the account given below, all names are fictitious.

The Glenwood Union School district comprises 19 school sites, which include four junior high schools, 15 elementary schools and two satellite offices; one of these houses the district office. This school district encompasses a large, flat rural area adjacent to a city of approximately 320000. The school population includes children from working class rural poor to upper middle class; their cultural backgrounds are predominantly white, although there are some Asians, Hispanics and African Americans as well.

The Data Processing Director, Mike McGrath, is in charge of the district's technology. His qualifications earned him the position: he has a B.A. in math at one of California's state universities and 16 years on the job technical training and experience maintaining technology equipment. McGrath works for the Assistant Superintendent of Business Services located in the district office. Working for him in his office are a computer programmer and a computer operator. He relies on these two colleagues to perform most of the system maintenance in the district office, which houses all the attendance, grades and other school records of the district's approximately 14,000 students. These records are not only valuable in themselves as student records, but are needed to prepare school, district and state reports. McGrath's salary and the two salaries of his two colleagues all come out of the district's Business Services budget. All three have 12 month positions and work year round. In addition, McGrath is responsible for purchasing, upgrading and maintaining all the district's computer and technology equipment as well as finding grant money to support school technology.

Because of the skills and assistance of these two colleagues, McGrath can spend 90% of his time servicing the area, going from school site to school site, taking care of the system maintenance problems which arise daily. His activities are analogous to a country doctor of a century ago, one who traveled to patients, both human and animal, spread out over wide expanses in the Midwest. Just like a medical doctor, the technology director has to make difficult choices, because the equipment he services has various life spans; the functioning of one piece of equipment may affect, in some cases, an entire school site. "We still have some Apple IIEs, and some PC 286s, along with many Pentium 233s and of course, the older equipment is always breaking down." McGrath sighed. "Then if a server crashes, for instance, that effects a lot of computers, a lot of applications. If one or two computers in a computer lab crash, that's not quite as serious. Of course, you have to consider the scope of our operations. We serve 470 teachers and their students. All schools have Internet connections; all schools except five have LANs and 12 schools have WAN connections. There are over 1400 computers in the district. All students in junior high have to take one semester of computer science. Within the next year our goal is to require an additional semester of computer science and to have all schools connected via WANs to the district office."

So he works closely with his assistant, the Technology Coordinator, Everett Long, who works with him in the field. Despite their close coordination, a backlog of repairs always exists. "To keep every piece of equipment in top performing condition," McGrath shakes his head, "we would need five or six additional micro-computer technicians. And that's just not possible on our budget. So we make do."

McGrath went on to explain how the two men divided the tasks. "Everett schedules all the computer training and conducts those sessions for all district personnel. He's a former teacher in the district but he's always had a great enthusiasm and interest in computers. He works only 10 months a year; his salary is paid out of the school budget for curriculum and instruction. He's primarily a software specialist who installs and maintains the software equipment, though he is knowledgeable about hardware also. He functions as a micro computer specialist. Actually, though, there isn't a clean break between hardware and software maintenance in our district," McGrath added. "The teachers tell him what needs fixing, what new equipment and software programs they want. That means he takes care of most of the software maintenance, including installing, upgrading and ordering new parts, equipment and programs--within the budgetary limits, of course. But he also helps me with hardware problems and I often take care of software.

"A lot of software maintenance amounts to cyber patrol," McGrath continued. "It's making sure students can't access dirty pictures on the Internet or teachers' attendance and grade records and reports. Then there's the problem of getting extraneous files off the classroom and lab computers, and preventing students from getting into each others' files and copying or changing data. You'd be surprised what students bring from home on their own floppy disks! Not just computer games, but other stuff, stuff that has no place in schools."

Most of the serious maintenance problems are hardware problems, McGrath stated. The most complex maintenance tasks are setting up and administering the networks, including the servers. "My job," he continued,"is to configure the servers and the workstations so that everything functions properly, including setting access limits and security. Between the two of us, we try to cover all the bases."

Despite--or perhaps because of--their close working relationship, problems arise. "Our difficulties stem from our different perspectives, our different priorities. My highest priority is making sure the district office functions happily and well, at least from a technical standpoint. If their staff can't work on reports or send them out, if a secretary's computer malfunctions, those are high priorities for me because secretaries deal with several computer applications and are responsible for sending reports to the district and the state. I work for the district directly; they pay my salary. If a server crashes or if there's a network problem, many applications are usually involved, and a lot of people are stopped dead in their tracks as far as using computers. So that's another top priority. A third priority is how computers are used. If they are used only for word processing, as in some of the students' computer labs, then that's a low priority, but if the computers are used for many applications, those computers take on a high priority.

"For Everett, his loyalty is to the faculty; their requests are his top priority. We always manage to work things out, but that's where the problems lie. And of course our different priorities become crucial because there's always more maintenance work than two people can accomplish."

When asked about upgrading equipment or purchasing new items, McGrath was clear. "We rarely, if ever, buy upgraded computers. It's better to buy a new computer than to add on to an existing one. We do try to upgrade our software programs. Our new computers usually go to the office personnel; the older machines are recycled to the computer labs where the equipment is used only for word processing. In purchasing new equipment, cost and free maintenance support for the customer are the two top factors we consider. User friendliness is a factor also, of course, as well as how well the item interfaces with our existing equipment. But the initial cost and the maintenance costs of the product are our primary concerns in any purchasing decision."

McGrath pointed out that his district's policies were not necessarily typical. He speculated that probably other districts with more money to spend have a technology coordinator at each school, with several team technicians to take care of all system maintenance, hardware and software. Then the technical coordinator could spend his time deciding on purchasing, obtaining grant money, getting feedback from faculty and team technicians about the maintenance program and possible purchases and replacements, including hardware and software, television and other media equipment and supplies. "Or," he added, there's the worst case scenario, when the district has little or no money and the Technology Coordinator works only part time and teaches for most of the school day. Actually he teaches very little because he's usually called out of his class on some emergency to repair a malfunctioning computer. No one needs this type of system maintenance, but it does exist. Our district, the more I think about it, is really doing very well, everything considered."
 

Related Websites

McGrath's position is similar to system operators in many schools. Typically, they've been in their job for quite a few years. Most of the knowledge and skills they have accumulated over the years has been hands on. Recently, however, the usefulness of the web has allowed new people in these positions to get up to speed more quickly. Listed below are a few of those sites.

Networks and networking: http://ousd.k12.ca.us/netday/links/refs/NTPG.html

Free computer help: http://www.execpc.com/~ccsi/comhelp.html

All about networks: http://users.why.net/tkee/kwang/Kwang.htm

Help page: http://www.cyberway.com.sg/~cyberlee/

On-line maintenance support for specific products, such as Hewlett Packard printers, listed by company producing a given product: http://cause-www.colorado.edu

Apple computers: http://www.info.apple.com/

 

Page author: Janet M. Hamann
URL: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/596r/module15/connect.html
Last updated: February 20, 1998