Information Technology Advisory Committee - Sep 24th, 2020

Attending: David Good, Sandy Pooler, Steve Revilak.

Arlington distributed approximately 4,000 computers for the start of the school year. Most of the distribution was done by the schools themselves. The biggest single-day distribution was around 2,200 machines.

We may outsource a helpdesk service for students and parents, in order to expedite service requests.

The town distributed 600 MacBook Airs to teachers, and 1,000 iPads to K--2nd graders. We're getting second monitors for teachers, to make it easier for them to manage video-conferences.

The school district provided a number of wireless hotspots to students who don't have internet access at home.

The Parmenter school is open, and houses the school district's guidance councilors and nurses. The wiring took longer than expected, but everything came together in time.

Central school construction continues, but hasn't progressed to the point where wiring can start.

We've hired a group of specialists to work with the architects on the DPW facility rebuild. They'll be assisting with server room design.

A number of cameras were installed in front of the high school, as part of construction security.

The town IT department is working with ACMi, on infrastructure to record and televise committee and board meetings.

The Munis utility billing project is still under way. We'll run a full set of billing data through the new modules to test. The test will involve comparing the test system bills with the actual bills.

New A/V equipment, wireless access points, and presenter podiums were installed in the town hall auditorium. There will be separate networks for A/V and voting equipment. Someday the pandemic will end, and we'll be able to make use of the new equipment.

658 new students will enter Arlington Public Schools this year (across all grades).

John Leone and Eric Helmuth are working on the Virtual Town Meeting system, in conjunction with a consultant who worked on Lexington's system.

ITAC has reviewed capital budgets requests for the fire department, library, and IT department.

Adam Glick and David Good are looking at a software permitting package for the planning department. There are three vendors under consideration.

The Office 365 migration is slowly moving forward. We still need to upgrade several of the town servers, for compatibility with Office 365.