When Brian Belinsky met with the South East Cornerstone Public School Division’s board of trustees on Dec. 17, be brought information regarding a proposed augmentation of Internet bandwidth access for Pleasantdale School.
Belinsky, the manager of information systems for the public school division, said the majority of the 38 schools in the southeast public system, had only 10 megabytes (MB) of bandwidth. A couple of schools, he said, had been approved by the Internet server to receive upgrades to as much as 100 MB and one of those schools was Pleasantdale. The other school was Arcola while a third school, Assiniboia in Weyburn had been approved originally, but had since been pulled from the queue by the server.
Larger schools such as Estevan Comprehensive and Weyburn Comprehensive already had 100 MB service and the Weyburn school would be jumped up to 200 once the Southeast College campus and administration offices moved into their new office complex which has become a part of a major renovation and expansion at WCS.
The project is nearing completion.
Belinsky said 10 MB, for most schools, has become inadequate and requests have gone in to the server company CNet, who, in turn, negotiate with SaskTel for bandwidth augmentations. He noted SaskTel has been involved in a pilot project with another school division to deliver 25,50 and 75 MB enhancements.
Belinsky said he saw one flaw in the overall assessment situation. He said that often the decisions to increase bandwidth, or deny a request for an increase, is solely based on student population rather than actual Internet use by the particular schools in question.
Estevan trustee Janet Foord said it was unfortunate the situation could evolve into one provincial Crown corporation dealing with another.
“Taxes were raised and centralized to provide equity in service, but I see now schools in larger centres forming partnerships with Crown corporations and gaining benefits from them,” said Foord.
Belinsky said so far SaskTel gets to dictate the rollout of these services because they didn’t have to compete to become the vendor and therefore there was no typical relationship like those in other provinces. He said some school divisions may eventually “opt out” of arrangements with CNet and begin bargaining for their own network, and some were already doing it.
Belinsky added that offering such items as free WiFi, similar as that provided in some restaurants and other public locations, is not a good solution. “Content filtering becomes a problem for school divisions if we accepted that route. We have direct bandwidth management at the school levels,” he said.
There was some discussion regarding the coupling of network locations to maximize bandwidth and system hardware.
Belinsky also reported on the recent enhancements to the server room that included a cooling system upgrade to maximize air flow, allow the division to keep the room temperature at an efficient 16 degrees Celsius. He said in the past, on occasion, the room temperature would sometime rise to above 40 C.
The information systems manager also gave an update on the disaster recovery systems and noted that it needed to be implemented just once before and worked well, but he felt his department needed to keep looking forward to identify future concerns or problems. He said one solution might be moving it from its current site at ECS.
Technology upgrades in schools is an ongoing issue, Belinsky reported. Desktop, laptops and mobile devices are being upgraded consistently with over 900 electronic devices receiving those upgrades in the past year. VoIP upgrades at ECS had also taken place he said to allow flexibility for paging, programming and uses inside the school, as well as its perimeters. He said three more schools were introduced to VoIP in the past year, making the total 20.
Board chairwoman Audrey Trombley said they would “fire another letter off to the Minister of Education,” to again emphasize their concerns and the issues that had been discussed with Belinsky.
