LYNNFIELD — Lynnfield Public Schools (LPS) is requesting a capital improvement project of $650,000 this spring to complete a districtwide technology upgrade that Superintendent Thomas Geary and Head of the Technology Department Rochelle Cooper say is badly needed.
Included in this upgrade would be 55 to 60 SMART boards, 90 teacher laptops, 600 Chromebooks for students, wireless access points, network switches, cores and firewall, and rack mount power distribution.
To help invested parties understand the importance of technology for students and how upgrading devices will improve learning, Cooper, along with the LPS Technical Support Engineer Head John Deluccia, have been leading walkthroughs of the Summer Street Elementary School.
Last Tuesday, Superintendent Thomas Geary and School Committee members Jenny Sheehan and Kate DePrizio were given a tour of different grades’ classrooms at Summer Street to see firsthand how devices are being used by the young learners.
“How our one-to-one at the elementary school works is wherever they are, there’s a cart with Chromebooks,” Cooper said. “And then at middle school, seven through 12, the kids get assigned a device, and it travels with them wherever they go.”
In total, there are 2,200 student devices, including Chromebooks and iPads, 385 staff devices, and 245 classroom devices with a SMART board or flat panel.
The oldest laptops being used range from seven to nine years old, far past the ideal lifespan of three to five years for when they should be replaced. As a result, many have physical damage like scratches and software limitations that don’t allow them to run the newest version of ChromeOS, for example.
“In the past, it was just what is the minimum amount that we need to get through this year,” said Deluccia. “But that’s what we’re trying to get away from because that makes it a lot harder to plan for when devices are going to fail.”
With over 40 student-facing software programs used by the district, laptops are an integral part of the classroom at every grade level.
In elementary schools, Chromebooks are especially important for their WIN block, which stands for “What I Need,” and serve as a time for kids to work on assignments and use apps that cater to their individual learning needs.
Without laptops, the WIN block would require more interventionists for instruction help, and teaching would be a lot less dynamic.
“We have so many apps that we can use on the Chromebooks too, so it’s not just like one or two,” Grade 1 teacher Kristin Hager said. “I mean, we have a set of literacy apps. We have some math apps, and every app serves a different purpose. It helps both from the student level and I think on the teacher level.”
For example, the Seesaw app provides a ready-made library of activities for the classroom, spanning from areas like reading proficiency to times tables, that also has functionality for parents to see and comment on the work their children are doing.
Mixed into these online lessons, teachers are also encouraged to give their classes “balance breaks,” where they might do light physical activities to get them refreshed and not staring at a screen for too long, hopefully installing healthy habits for when they go home as well.
Importantly, standardized tests like MCAS and AP exams are fully online, while newer textbooks and curriculums ubiquitously come with online components, testaments to the importance of having online capabilities and skills for each student.
“One of the skills another fourth grade class yesterday was talking about is they were giving them a tool to actually highlight your whole MCAS essay, copy it so that you don’t lose it if you have to put it somewhere else,” DePrizio said.
In the Summer Street School’s media classroom, students were working on a project that tasked them with creating a Google Slides presentation that had to convince an audience to travel to their assigned country.
Activities like these are not possible without each student having access to Chromebooks, and teaching becomes much more open with up-to-date technology in each classroom.
This is why another large component of the capital improvement project is replacing all of the older model SMART boards with the newer SMART panels.
Teachers like Hager, whose classroom still has a SMART board that needs a projector to work, attest to the roadblocks caused by the aging technology, like an irritating shadow when working on the board or a touchscreen that is always decreasing in responsiveness.
“I feel like the clarity of it, how effective it is, the pace of it, really affects my teaching, day to day,” Hager said. “It’s night and day when I have meetings, and we have the flat panel. It’s so much faster. It is more user-friendly.”
Whereas the boards require the projector for it to work, the panel only needs to be plugged in, meaning less technology needs to be integrated into a classroom and, thus, fewer issues can arise.
There are also more capabilities for interactions with the classroom, as the panel can link directly with the teacher and student Chromebooks through an app called Lumio. This allows for more dynamic lessons and easier tracking of student progress.
“I just think it’s such an interactive way to enhance learning. There’s a lot that we do on the SMART board together. It’s super motivating for kids,” Hager said. “We use it for both literacy and math. There are games that we can do, lessons that we do up here. I just think it really increases student engagement overall.”
But all of these devices are useless without wireless access points to connect them to the Wi-Fi, a device that is on every classroom’s ceiling and has the appearance of a large fire alarm.
“All the stuff you see today, everything with the Chromebook goes through a wireless access point,” Deluccia said. “So those are aged to the point where, you might have all this tech and all these good tools, but they’re going to be hindered.”
At this point, Deluccia has been replacing these access points as they fail, something that has actually been a safety hazard as the clips that hold them to the ceilings have melted off after years of heating up. Now, they are all being held to the ceiling by bungee cords.
Lynnfield High School recently had a complete upgrade of its wireless access points and has already seen major improvements. Now, Deluccia wants to do a full overhaul of these ports, switching to a different brand and making them all up-to-date.
The Select Board will vote on whether or not they will approve the $650,000 funding for the project in April. If the CIP funding is not approved, then the School Committee will have to find some way to make room in their budget for the urgent upgrades.
“We want [the Select Board] to come through so they understand how tech is used, why it’s important, why we need the funding for it. Typically, they give us around 250,000 for capital expenses, but this is like a $650,000 request,” Sheehan said. “So that’s kind of the discrepancy of why we want them to see how important it is and how it’s actually functioning in our elementary school, especially.”
