Technology bond: Ann Arbor schools central office to see $420K in server room upgrades
Executive Director of Physical Properties Randy Trent poses inside a crowded server room at the Balas Administration Building. The makeshift server rooms soon could receive renovations thanks to the district's technology bond.
Chris Asadian | AnnArbor.com file photo
The renovations, if approved Wednesday by the Board of Education, will be to three makeshift and fragmented server rooms in the Ann Arbor Public Schools Central Office. The equipment and infrastructure housed in these rooms controls most of the technology operations district wide.
The three rooms will be redesigned and better engineered to create one distinct server room, one fiber closet and, if space allows, one small room for an office or conference room, according documents from the district.
There also will be significant heating and cooling and mechanical work done in the rooms, which currently have issues with equipment overheating.
Walking through these rooms right now, one would see tangles of wires and fans blowing on pieces of hardware to keep the district's technology operations up and running. The consolidation of the three rooms will allow for better access to the equipment and better climate control, documents say.
As the district faces an $8.67 million budget shortfall for the upcoming school year, community members and the Ann Arbor Administrators Association repeatedly have called for closing the Balas building and dispersing central office staff in schools throughout the district.
But AAPS Executive Director of Physical Properties Randy Trent said at the May 8 Board of Education meeting that district officials have worked hard over the years to centralize many of the servers that were scattered throughout AAPS to the main server room at Balas. He said the idea behind this was to be able to reduce the number of employees and employees compensation costs, which comes out of the general fund.
He said having the equipment all in one spot saves the district from needing more staff to run off to different buildings to fix problems that would arise.
"It would cost well over $1 million to rewire the district in a different way that doesn't all come back to Balas," Trent said.
Danielle Arndt covers K-12 education for AnnArbor.com. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleArndt or email her at daniellearndt@annarbor.com.
Comments
John
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 8:07 p.m.
Everyone seems to be focusing on email, saying it should be moved to "the cloud". What seems to be more at point here are routers and switches that make up the physical netwrok infrastructure at this facility. Referring to "the server room" is kind of generic and doesn't really specify what equipment is being upgraded. Besides that, there are many other services besides email that an Educational IT body uses and maintains that don't really have cloud-based options. Machine imaging and deployment, for example. A lot of course-management frameworks are usually self-hosted as well. There's more than just email.
dotdash
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 4:55 p.m.
This bothers me. They sold the tech bond by demonstrating need in student-populated buildings and student bodies -- and the first (very large) expenditure is in the administrative area? I have always supported education millages, but this one burns me. Watch out, AAPS, you are alienating even the loyal core.
dogface
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 12:49 p.m.
wonder what Mr. Trent's credentials are as an "executive director" of computer systems
Wake Up A2
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 10:22 a.m.
Cloud all the way. Cheaper, managed by folks you dont supply benefits for. Data is data and nothing more.
Dithering Ninny
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 1:54 a.m.
We can cut, but the administration wont get any smarter. We can cut, but the kids won't get any smarter (because the Admin will hurt the kids first). We can pay and they will waste and we must accept that as part of the price-any the kids wont get any smarter...your choice
RUKiddingMe
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 12:35 a.m.
Boy, there are some REALLY good questions in here. I hope someone brings them up and gets satisfactory answers at the next meeting where these people are wringing their hands about their budget crisis. Was it ONLY in A2.com comments that I saw Balas being closed as an option? It seems to me like if this guy is specifically mentioning this as a reason to keep Balas, then it must have come up in budget meetings before. And if it HAS, then that means they're committing all this money with the full knowledge that the discontinuation of the use of this building is at least a possibility. Which means they're pouring (about twice or 3 times what any other company would pay) the money into not just hardware but complete re-builds of these rooms. Which is exactly the kind of thing people need to remember the next time another millage request comes up. It's so easy to get this money because all they have to do is say "it's for the kids," and everyone falls for it. Then this happens. And $1700 MacBook Pros. Many of which are stored for future use. And about 300 other things that, if you saw them happening, you would demand your money back. There are two groups of peole who suffer from this. Us, the taxpayers, because they wasted our money. And the kids. Because they're no smarter or more capable now than they were when this millage passed. The people spending the money do NOT suffer.
Technojunkie
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 11:40 p.m.
You could make the case for outsourcing things like email to "the cloud". Maybe. The big expense is the network infrastructure. Cabling, ports, switches, routers and all that. Rerouting dedicated lines from Balas to a different building would cost. It may still be worth doing but I can understand the aversion to it. Especially since it means dealing with AT&T. If you wanted to go all-out with a countywide fiber-to-the-home network infrastructure, more-or-less what Google was going to do, then as a bonus doing things like moving a network central office becomes much less traumatic.
JRW
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 11:36 p.m.
How do other schools districts manage their IT across multiple buildings? I just can't believe that other districts have this kind of primitive situation with their IT facilities: "Walking through these rooms right now, one would see tangles of wires and fans blowing on pieces of hardware to keep the district's technology operations up and running." It's just unbelievable that AAPS is so outdated and inept at keeping up with technology revisions and upgrades as they go along, rather than in crisis mode. Where has the rest of the $4.8 million tech bond been spent over the last year? Is the tech bond $$ going to be used for constructions renovations? How is that technology? Where are all the new computers for the district's school buildings? Buildings still are using old desktop macs from the 1990's.
kathryn
Sat, May 25, 2013 : 12:01 a.m.
" It's just unbelievable that AAPS is so outdated and inept at keeping up with technology revisions and upgrades as they go along, rather than in crisis mode. " That's because in the AAPS technology is funded with bond money instead of operating funds. It takes steady funding to keep up with technology revisions. The current funding model leads to this situation...technology ages until it's a crisis, then everything is fixed up (which takes a couple of years to roll out), then it will ages again until it's a crisis. (BTW...computer upgrades are underway. )
JRW
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 11:06 p.m.
So, one year after the tech bond is approved, they have a plan to renovate the server room this summer??? It's just hard to believe that they didn't have a plan in place last year BEFORE the tech bond was approved. This work could have been done LAST summer if a plan had been in place when the tech bond was put forward and subsequently passed in May 2012. It's just amazing how inept this district is in so many ways organizationally and administratively. $45.8 million technology bond that was passed 12 months ago, minus the $420,000 for the server room updates, = about $4.5 million left over. What is being done with that money? What exactly has been done with that money since the bond was passed a year ago? Where is the plan for that money, which should be publicly available.
RUKiddingMe
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 10:53 p.m.
Boy, I cannot help but wonder how many of these issues could be resolved without throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars of free money at it. I have worked at several places that had server rooms that looked much, MUCH worse than this, and even with mindboggling (at least, I thought so at the time) amounts of money less than half of what is mentioned here we reorganized, got new blades, reran wires, and cleaned up the multiple closets. So is that the sole justification for keeping Balas, because that's where our server rooms are? The server rooms that apparently need multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade and cool? Really? I hope everyone who voted for this technology millage is paying to attention to all this. They still storing those $1700 MacBook Pro's in a room somewhere, or have those finally been distributed? All the kids getting excellent educational use and really pushing the perfomance of those things?
AMOC
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 12:32 p.m.
JA Pieper - The techs and the principals may have MacBook Pros. The cabinet and many principals got iPads and iPhones instead. Toys for administration, complete with generous data plans 2 years before any equipment from the Tech Bond will actually be in classrooms or school computer labs. Only in Ann Arbor!
J. A. Pieper
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 12:46 a.m.
The techs have MacBook Pros, no one else has seen them.
DonBee
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 10:21 p.m.
AAPS shares some computing infrastructure with WISD and does some themselves. Where the split is, has never been explained to the AAPS community. Why they can't consolidate the whole thing at WISD or with a professional hosting company is beyond me. I know from talking to my children's friends, how much of a joke the security of the systems at AAPS are. There is no question there are bandwidth issues in the middle schools and the high school and most of that comes from mobile devices the students use. Some teachers have asked students to put their mobile devices (e.g. iPhones) on the school network with the right software to defeat the firewalls. Comcast, and the UofM at various times have both offered AAPS a hand on the network issues at the schools, and AAPS continues to choose to go its own way. Of course since this is technology bond money, there is no reason for AAPS to do a good job in spending it. It can't be used for salaries, so there is no reason to be frugal.
Nicholas Urfe
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 10:16 p.m.
Oh my. They have some slack in their cabling. Slack! Can't they hire some $200/hr consultants to pretty things up so people are impressed?
a2citizen
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 11:20 p.m.
The guys who pretty it up are down to less than $20 per hour.
ducktales
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 9:33 p.m.
It's not as simple as saying "abracadabra" to move information responsibly to the cloud. There is a huge issue of PII being stored on a system that could potentially reside in many jurisdictions outside of the U.S. Furthermore, there is a huge accountability issue when incidents do occur, forensic, security, and police action can be difficult to achieve effectively. A move to the cloud can be done well, I just doubt AAPS has anyone that could manage it and their "consultants," well they'd hire a consultant to help them find a consultant, that would end up messing things up.
DonBee
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 10:16 p.m.
ducktales - Who would you rather have managing PII, a professional hosting company with full time security and privacy staff or an AAPS IT person with many responsibilities that do not include security and privacy? I for one, expect that if someone wishes to hack the servers that it would be easy. Almost as easy as getting around the school firewalls, which the students have proven over and over again, they can get around in about an hour from the district having updated them. I don't know a single tech savvy student who can't get around the security that AAPS has put in place on any piece of equipment they have deployed. Want to go to Facebook from your mobile device on the school wifi - it takes about 45 seconds to get around the security. Same goes for logging on to almost any device the school owns. I vote hosted by professionals if you are worried about PII.
fanofA2MI
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 9:30 p.m.
The cloud or a co-lo could reduce costs (from hardware, electricity costs, air conditioning, and labor cost to name a few). It would interesting to know what options they considered before saying yes with maintaining the existing.
towncryer
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 9:24 p.m.
So if Balas isn't closed, couldn't they just weed out non-essential staff (and i mean NON-ESSENTIAL) and rent out the office space made vacant?
Hot Sam
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 8:58 p.m.
The spaghetti in the picture is inexcusable... hopefully they will find a vendor capable of proper wiring protocol...
DJBudSonic
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 2:59 a.m.
Seriously, that is nowhere near the worst of the stuff in the school system. That doesn't look so bad, I have seen waaay worse.
a2citizen
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 1:23 a.m.
Not defending him...whether it was a vendor or his techs that did that, I would think that his title implies a responsibility to audit and inspect installations
Hot Sam
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 12:55 a.m.
A2...the gentleman in the picture is described as "Director of Physical Properties" ...sorry, but to me that is evidence of the need to find other work...
a2citizen
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 11:19 p.m.
A vendor doing that would probably have been fired.
Hot Sam
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 9:47 p.m.
It's still inexcusable...
Usual Suspect
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 9:43 p.m.
The mess usually happens after the vendor leaves.
Dog Guy
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 8:13 p.m.
While they're in there, they could update the pager transmitter from beepers to alphanumeric units. And please do not confuse the experts by mentioning the cloud.
Greg
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 8:06 p.m.
So according the the story on Balas, the building is vacant. So executive director Trent is working to put all his expensive hardware into a vacant building? Who is this guy? Why is he working here to commit us to expensive projects that cannot be moved or downscaled with budget changes? Perhaps he could be cut, and then take another look at the problem.
acorn
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 3:36 a.m.
Balas is not vacant. I'm not sure how you got that impression.
kludwig
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 8:02 p.m.
Yes, moving to the cloud would be a good way to decrease cost and increase reliability.The district needs to be gone through from top to bottom to process map all functions to optimize efficiencies BEFORE draconian cuts are made. The budget needs forensic revue from independent auditors to create fully accesible informatics so the public can track every dollar and see just how much goes to direct instruction and how much goes to organizational "friction". Not much has changed since I sat on the Citizens Budget Review Committee many, many years ago except that the numbers got larger and losses bigger.
TheDiagSquirrel
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 7:38 p.m.
Technology is only as effective as the people using it...
A2comments
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 7:35 p.m.
News flash - right after doing this they'll shut Balas to save money...
Kafkaland
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 7:14 p.m.
Shouldn't commodity computing, like servers, move to the cloud? I would guess that it's way cheaper to have Google or a similar provider host your web, email, etc. servers than renovate your building, provide and maintain the server infrastructure, etc.
Topher
Wed, May 22, 2013 : 10:11 a.m.
I'm not sure, but there may be legal restrictions too. Students' information, I believe, cannot be housed on something like the Google server. There are state and federal laws about where that information can be safely stored.
beardown
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 8:53 p.m.
Just throwing this out there. The state of North Carolina, in conjunction with it's major universities and various state and federal groups, is in the process of creating a state-wide cloud based system for all schools k-12 in the state. This would allow all schools to have access to the same systems. State-wide buying power as opposed to schools fighting it out on their own. State-wide IT departments as opposed to small groups with different philosophies. You know, an actual department within a state government that is actually doing something that makes sense. But that would require Lansing to actually try something that is helpful instead of using every dime and every second trying to make Michigan into the WalMart of education.
kludwig
Tue, May 21, 2013 : 7:45 p.m.
Yes, this would be a good way to decrease cost and increase reliability.The district needs to be gone through from top to bottom to process map all functions to optimize efficiencies BEFORE draconian cuts are made. The budget needs forensic revue from independent auditors to create fully accesible informatics so the public can track every dollar and see just how much goes to direct instruction and how much goes to organizational "friction". Not much has changed since I sat on the Citizens Budget Review Committee many, many years ago except that the numbers got larger and losses bigger.