With the approval of Board members, Española School District administrators are planning for a new set of technology upgrades as part of their one-to-one initiative.
Española School Superintendent Danny Trujillo said the initiative’s purpose is to expose District students to technology at an early age and to place some kind of device, be it laptop or tablet, in their possession while at school.
“Technology is going to impact students’ futures and they need to learn how to use it and be exposed to it.” Trujillo said. “We are partnering with companies to make Internet access cheaper, we want students to use technology and know about it.”
To accomplish that goal, District Technology Coordinator Andrew Trujillo said District systems require an upgrade to handle the additional bandwidth for the devices and new systems he is going to run.
To date, Board members unanimously approved two different upgrades — replacing switches for the District and increasing Internet upload speeds at four different schools.
Andrew Trujillo said the switches provide the foundation for every other upgrade he wants to do.
They are required for the wireless network he wants to establish for District schools. They are also necessary for the phones. District administrators want to move away from traditional phone lines and use the Internet.
Board members first approved, Aug. 20, upgrading Internet speeds for outlying District elementary schools such as Mountain View, Chimayó and Abiquiú. Currently, the schools are using T1 connections with maximum speeds of 3 megabytes per second.
Andrew Trujillo said that speed is good for basic tasks such as sending email, but is inadequate for using multimedia functions such as video.
“At that speed, there will be a lot of buffering,” he said. “Videos will be slow and it will not be enough for the new systems we want to use.”
He’s referring to the new Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Under this new program, students will be evaluated on whether they have the skills necessary for college or a career in a technical or vocational field.
To determine their proficiency, they will be tested. Instructors will evaluate their exams and upload scores into a Web-based application system for others to view.
Since nearly everyone will be using the system, demand will be high.
The majority of the schools already have high-speed access — 50 megabytes per second — but Internet service providers did not have the infrastructure to provide that kind of speed to the outlying schools. Now they do, Andrew Trujillo said.
He said he and his staff recommended Windstream, and the company will charge more than $4,000 per month for the additional speed. That comes out to more than $500,000 over 10 years.
He does not expect to pay the entire bill, because the federal government has a program that provides technology for school Districts called e-rate.
E-rate provides funding to districts throughout the country for technology products and infrastructure spending.
Andrew Trujillo said he hopes the government will reimburse him when he applies for funding.
“It is a gamble,” Andrew Trujillo said. “We never know if we are going to get the money, but we cannot wait until we get the funding because of all the programs we need to run this year.”
He said that other districts will only pay a portion of the bill and vendors will be paid directly by the government. He said he wants to adopt that procedure for the District in the future.
“I understand we need an upgrade,” Board member Andrew Chavez said. “Technology gets old very quickly so I understand we need to get new parts.”
Andrew Trujillo said using current switches are costly because they are antiquated.
He said the District accepted them from Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2007 and even then, the switches were starting to become obsolete.
“Sometimes the switches go down and we have to fix them,” he said. “When that happens, it is hard to find parts for them and when we do, they are very expensive because no one carries them.”
According to the project timeline he and his team established, the switches are estimated to cost more than $400,000.
Although, Andrew Trujillo said he does not expect it will cost that much.
“The bids that are coming in are much less than that, so we should realize some savings,” he said.
These are just two of the improvements Andrew Trujillo has planned and there are more to come. District administrators plan to use the technology notes to pay for the improvements.
The New Mexico Finance Authority approved about $1.6 million in bonds over five years.
“The District will pay the bond money back from tax revenue,” District Financial Advisor Leo Valdez said. “Basically, residents will pay for the bonds through taxes from property values.”
Some residents wonder why the administrators are spending so much on technology when students do not have basic supplies such as textbooks.
“The teachers have the resources they need,” Danny Trujillo said. “We are in the 21st century and technology is part of that. We need to provide students with those tools. That is why I going with this initiative.”