When a district has a nuclear power plant not two miles from one of its elementary schools, concerns about disaster recovery are bound to surface in technology discussions. Yet it took Mathew Swerdloff, director of technology for Hendrick Hudson School District, three tries and three years before he found a system he could trust for maintaining and archiving data.
Four school districts in Texas have gone public with their implementation of SchoolReach Instant Parent Contact system this year.
Mississippi's Pass Christian School District is using Axis Communications network cameras for security in its public schools. About 150 Axis network cameras will be deployed inside and outside of the four schools, the central office, and a new daycare center.
El Paso Independent School District has completed emergency preparedness training with school administrators and local first responders with assistance from Prepared Response.
The Ron Clark Academy of Atlanta, GA, has chosen the SiteSurv 3.5 managed service for its on-campus Web filtering and security. The service, from CyberPatrol, uses an extensive category-based filtering process that is operated via a Web control panel.
Ann Arbor Public Schools' administrators and staff have completed emergency plans and training with help from Prepared Response, which provides on-site emergency preparedness consulting and training to schools.
The way Berea City School District used to train its nearly 1,000 faculty and staff members on health, safety, and compliance issues was to send a videotape on the given topic to one of its 12 schools. People would attend a staff meeting to watch the video and sign a sheet to prove they were in attendance. Then the video would be sent to the next school on the list.
Blackboard has reported that during just eight days, from April 27 to May 4, its notification system, Blackboard Connect, was used by United States schools and government workers to send some 9.8 million messages tied to updates and information about the swine flu.
Batavia Public Schools District No. 101 in Illinois has closed bidding on an access control/surveillance system to cover its eight schools and district headquarters. According to local newspaper The Beacon News, 17 companies have bid on the project, which will be exploiting the bandwidth available from a district data communications network upgrade from 1 gigabit fiber to 10 gigabit fiber.
The Texas Region 17 Education Service Center (ESC) has contracted with SchoolReach, a K-12 parent notification service, to make the contact system available to member schools at a discount. The service center is an organization created to provide services to schools in Region 17, which encompasses the 20 counties surrounding Lubbock, Texas.