Board confronts costly tech tangle

A special school board meeting Feb. 1 featured an inquiry into rising technology costs, and revealed in startling detail “glaring security holes,” server updates that were missed, and antivirus packages purchased but not installed.

“Nothing was done for four years,” contractor T.J. Smith told the board. “I’ll be point-blank honest and blunt: your previous tech director, I don’t know what that person did.”

As if on cue, Wednesday’s committee of the whole meeting featured business manager Angela Lind announcing she couldn’t access budgetary information for a planned update due to a cyberattack. Forty districts were affected by financial software being down due to the attack, she explained.

“We’re getting daily updates,” superintendent Kim Belcastro said about the attack on Arrowhead Regional Computing Consortium, a cooperative service which aids districts in its financial and data management.

The school board terminated the district’s previous technology director in September, after an investigation confirmed the person made a threat against superintendent Kim Belcastro.

Smith is a former technology director with the district. He now works for Cloquet public schools, but he’s continued to contract with Wrenshall at a rate of $60 per hour. His $18,180 worth of bills for services so far this school year far surpasses any of his previous billings.

Those invoices had never topped $7,085 annually, as the district has relied on a combination of a part-time tech director supplemented with contracted help from Smith and a Sartell, Minnesota-based company called Tech Check.

The tech inquiry came as the board and district administration are in the process of cutting $300,000 from the budget, with some teaching positions exposed to cuts at the end of the school year.

“I cannot look at teachers and say we’re going to continue to cut positions, and (still) write free checks on tech for the rest of the year,” board member Mary Carlson said. “We are far too over at this point.”

Positioned across from board members, Smith and teacher Debbie Fenlason addressed the school board. Fenlason is serving in a limited role in technology for the district this year. She talked about the environment left behind by the sudden termination of the previous tech director, including a lack of inventory of equipment the district owns.

“I found a beautiful printer,” Fenlason said. “I don’t know if it’s ours or one of our contactors. We don’t have a record of it.”

She also made it sound like she wasn’t the person to permanently fill the district’s open part-time tech director position.

“I kind of understand Google and Google admin, but working with the active directory and Azure and stuff like that is a huge learning curve for me,” Fenlason said, referring to Azure, a program at the heart of the district’s current technology failings.

Smith outlined a host of issues he’s uncovered since being asked by the administration to correct the district’s tech failings, which have resulted in slower computing operations and more frequent crashes. When he left the Wrenshall job for Cloquet, Smith said he left behind a list of projects that needed to be completed. None of it was done, he said, including a failure to replace Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with updated versions. Server 2012 is no longer supported by Microsoft and Wrenshall’s servers were not receiving security updates, Smith said.

“There’s zero excuse why that was never upgraded,” he said, describing how he had to recreate the “brain” of the school’s entire network, a pair of domain controllers, as a result.

Groups of teachers and students weren’t getting automatic updates targeted to their devices because the Azure connection with the cloud containing updates had been broken. Smith didn’t know for how long.

“But it was a significant period of time,” Smith said. “No computers were having managed Windows updates, security updates, things like that. There were a lot of glaring holes when it came to Azure (Activity Directory).”

Smith explained that while he’s taking care of “back-end” processes, the district pays Tech Check $10,000 annually to maintain its student and teacher connectivity — issues with network and Wi-Fi, specifically. That money is partly reimbursed by the federal government at a tidy 70 percent. But the previous Wrenshall tech director failed to apply for reimbursement funding for the current school year, said Smith and Fenlason.

“Great,” Carlson said.

“This is not a sustainable system that we’re doing for tech right now,” board member Eric Ankrum said. “We need to reassess how much budget gets allocated for tech services.”

The board preferred hiring another half-time tech director moving forward. But Smith cautioned: “A few times now the district has had to go with the cheapest option and it hasn’t worked out well,” he said.

Board member Misty Bergman was wary of Smith’s report to the board, saying it was his opinion that nothing had been done for years, and wondering if he was just looking for problems.

“You could tell us anything and we don’t have a clue,” she said. “How do we check what you’re saying is correct?”

Bergman said she’d prefer to do away with student Chromebooks and go back to using regular school books.

“Maybe that will save us some money,” she said.

Smith described a changing technology environment, one in which individual hackers have given way to state-sponsored organizations that are targeting schools with cyberattacks such as ransomware. He described virtual thieves who can be ceaseless in their attempts to collect student data. A bad hack can shut down a school district, he said, noting places where that has happened.

“IT has changed significantly over the last five years,” Smith said. “And, honestly, it’s going to continue to change; it’s ever-changing, ever-evolving and we’ve been trying to play catchup, to get the ship pointed in the right direction so the district has tech it needs to operate going forward.”

For now, the board asked that Smith report ongoing tech projects and needs to principal Michelle Blanchard, who would carry requests to the board for approval. The board no longer wanted to see costs in hindsight, Carlson said.

“We’re a new board; we’re starting fresh, and we’re trying to be more transparent,” board chair Nicole Krisak said. “We want to know ahead of time. We want to be more on top of things.”

Board sets special meeting

The newly installed school board in Wrenshall continued to push for more time together Wednesday during its monthly committee of the whole meeting. The board scheduled a special meeting for 6 p.m. March 1. The meeting will come after a Feb. 21 budget committee meeting to prepare an updated budget report. The special meeting will be used to go over the revised budget, one based on the district’s current enrollment of 344 students.

The board meets for its regular February meeting at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 13, but didn’t have time to gather a budget report prior to that meeting.

The March 1 special meeting will also feature a vote to approve job postings for the open superintendent position. So far, a community survey about what it wants to see in a new superintendent has featured 154 respondents, said search committee chair Misty Bergman.

The survey is open through Monday, and because board members agreed they couldn’t process community survey responses fast enough and craft a job description and postings in time for Wednesday’s meeting, the vote for approval of those items will also take place March 1.

The board is already planning to post the superintendent position in multiple formats — as a full-time superintendent/principal working alongside a dean of students (costing an estimated $213,000), or as a part-time superintendent, like the current format, utilizing a full-time principal and administrative paraprofessional ($203,000 to $208,000).

Wrenshall’s idea of sharing a superintendent with Carlton was a non-starter when presented to the Carlton school board last month.

Earlier this month, the board began a yearlong series of new meetings it’s calling “study sessions.” The study sessions started Feb. 1, and will continue April 5 for the first of five remaining meetings.

Study sessions by the board are open to the public but will not yield action items or votes and will not take public comment.

Instead, the study sessions will serve to let committees report progress on tasks and goals, keeping the full board informed of topics related to committee work. Committees currently reporting to the board include committees on negotiations, state high school league issues, building safety, special education, community education, technology, grant writing, staff development/World’s Best Workforce, legislative matters, budget and operating capital, meet and confer, re-licensure, Partners In Education, construction/facilities, policies, the Carlton-Wrenshall sports and activities cooperative, building and grounds, and superintendent search.