ORDER-2016-32 : Appropriate from account Raised and Appropriated in the amount of $300,000.00; and Appropriate to account 019313-551098 (Capital Outlay, City IT Technology) in the amount of $150,000.00; and Appropriate to account 01931773-551097 (Capital Outlay, School IT Technology) in the amount of $150,000.00

Transcript (~51 min @ 24:30)

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▶ 24:15 Peter D. Mortimer: Second. Alderman Aferna has made a motion to close public participation. Said motion was once again duly seconded by Alderman Boisselle. All in favor of closing public participation, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, hearing none, public participation is now closed. The order before the Appropriations Committee tonight is order 2016-32. Appropriate from account raised and appropriated in the amount of $300,000 and Appropriate to account 019313551098 capital outlay city IT technology in the amount of $150,000. And appropriate to account 01931773551097 capital outlay school IT technology in the amount of $150,000. This order is offered by the administration. If there's a motion to suspend,

▶ 25:28 Peter D. Mortimer: we can hear from members of the administration. Motion to suspend the rules. Alderman Forbes has made a motion to suspend the rules. Said motion was duly seconded by Alderman Byrd. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none, Mr. DellaRusso and anyone else who feels it's appropriate come up at this time from the city there are several here please come forward from members

▶ 26:11 Peter D. Mortimer: of the public watching at home um going from my left to my right we have mr j picconi he is the auditor for the school department mr george pesos he is the chief information officer for the city of melrose miss cindy tamors he is the superintendent of schools for the city of melrose Melrose, and Mr. Patrick De La Russo, who is the Chief Financial Officer and Auditor for the City of Melrose. Welcome, lady and gentlemen. Thank you. Would anyone like to make an opening statement, or would you all like to make statements before we proceed to a colloquy? Mr. De La Russo, please.

▶ 26:44 Speaker 1: Thank you. Good evening. Very pleased to be here, obviously. I'm anxious to answer any and all questions one may have pertaining to finance. First and foremost, I think it's imperative that we understand that the funding for the item in question this evening is being funded through three different sources. The same exact sources that we fund, for example, the police vehicle lease for five years. It's raised and appropriate. state aid it's taxation and local receipts it's in budget number 931 for capital and it's not debt it's strictly from the traditional sources that we fund all our budget items period thank you thank you mr delarusso with any other city officials mr

▶ 27:38 Peter D. Mortimer: pesos i see you uh moving the microphone in a way to indicate that you are ready to speak next thank

▶ 27:45 Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you and thank you for your consideration of this order. I'd like to read a statement I've prepared for tonight. This order is to request appropriation of the FY16 budget to the accounts mentioned in the order to be used to fund the first year of a five year technology capital lease. This lease would allow the city to purchase the necessary equipment to address long standing technology needs for the city of Melrose and the Melrose public schools you're also seeking the board's approval to enter into the five-year lease that would allow us to make this purchase I would like to emphasize that this expenditure is not a bond or borrowed money but a lease that is being supported within the city's regular operating budget the intent of this request is to address some of the considerable technology needs of the city and the schools the primary goal is to provide the technological foundation needed to to advance the goals set forth in our plans. What will these improvements mean for the city? These improvements will enable our city staff to work productively and better serve our citizens. They will enable public safety personnel to access the critical systems that they depend on on a daily basis. It will enable teachers to access the latest instructional tools and utilize the latest instructional methods. enable students to benefit from these tools and methods while preparing them for the next phase of their lives once they leave the Melrose public schools these improvements address infrastructure needs such as networking improvements city and school district wide wireless networking data center needs such as storage and next-generation firewalls needed to protect and monitor our infrastructure investment these improvements will update the computing devices used by city and school staff and students these computing devices computers Chromebooks and iPads are the gateways used by everyone that allows them to work and learn in a modern way in short it positions us for success as you can see this request has quite a bit of supporting documentation and I'd like to take some time to provide an overview so that we may all have an understanding of the documents being used to support this request the first document as part of this order is the city of melrose five-year strategic technology plan this report is a broad overview of what the city's vision is for technology over the next five years it is the sister document to the five-year strategic technology plan for the melrose public schools which was presented to the school committee on april 14th of this year and provided to the board of aldermen on april 17th of this year there are also two project quotes submitted as part of this order the document titled project quote requesting leasing approval is the quote that would need your approval to fund the technology plans please note that this project total as part of this quote is the true and total cost of this project would be evenly distributed over the five years of the lease the document titled project quote purchase off state contract represents the standard state contract price for all of the equipment that is part of this request you can compare these two reports to determine how well we did with pricing as you can see we were able to negotiate approximately a 624 000 savings over the standard state contract price there are also several technology surveys the technology department conducted surveys earlier this year to gauge city staff sentiment various areas of technology service delivery these attachments are graphs representing the results of this survey there are several deployment schedules these schedules detail by location the expected distribution and and quantity computing devices that are being purchased as part of this request. So for example, if you were to look at the Winthrop School deployment schedule, you will see that there will be 39 teacher and administrative computers, eight student use computers, and 100 Chromebooks distributed across four carts. There will also be a small cart of 15 iPads. Lastly, you will see several specification sheets. sheets are industry standard documents that describe in detail each piece of equipment included as part of this request. Our plan, if this request were to be approved, would be to move to order and lease this equipment immediately under our existing master lease agreement with Eplus Leasing Group. Working with manufacturers, we would determine the actual shipping timelines for all of the equipment and build deployment schedules based on that information. The majority of this work will be completed by city and school staff, although there are some contractors being hired as part of this project to complete work associated with wiring and deployment of access points, mainly at Melrose High School. It is our goal to have this equipment up and running as soon as possible and preferably have substantial completion of the project by February of 2016. At that time, the city would sign a certificate of acceptance indicating its receipt, approval and satisfaction with the equipment. The date of the certificate of acceptance becomes the effective date of the lease agreement. It should be said that our intent is to request that this budget expenditure be approved annually to support our lease agreement. After the project is complete, I would welcome the opportunity to appear before the Board of alderman to provide a post project briefing the purpose of this briefing is to provide final reports and inventories the location and distribution of the equipment purchased through this project it would also provide the board of alderman the opportunity for further discussion of the project to better understand how the city has handled this significant investment i realize that this request represents a considerable investment by the city of melrose and its citizens i also realize that there is never a good time to ask for a 1.5 million dollar expenditure i'd like to point out respectfully why i believe that this is the right request the right time simply put we desperately need it and it should have been done years ago consider that this foundational plan in part aims to provide for our students to be 21st century learners consider also that this plan concludes in 2020 once we are 20 of the way through the 21st century i ask you to think how much longer can we afford to put that off consider that the city invests in areas such as energy efficiency road improvements water and sewer system improvements to name but a few yet we do not provide all of the necessary tools for our employees to manage track and maintain these investments tools such as modern computers to run gis mapping to identify the location of underground infrastructure computer-aided drafting software to allow our engineers to design and update plans of this infrastructure and computers that run management applications used to manage and control our improved hvac and lighting systems consider that we insist that educators make data-driven decisions but do not provide the tools for them to collect analyze and act on that data consider that in the 15 years i've served in this role the school department has budgeted in total barely over 150 000 for computer replacements in its budget there has been no responsible plan for the consistent replacement of technology equipment in large part because there is never enough money and it is never a good time i'm here to implore that you understand that this is a necessary expenditure in closing i hope that my presentation tonight and the documents that are part of this order represent the information that you require to make an informed decision to fund the technology improvements needed by our city as i know you must have questions you will gladly take those now thank you very much mr pesos

▶ 36:04 Peter D. Mortimer: Seeing no further city officials wishing to speak at this time, we will proceed to comments and questions from members of the Appropriations Committee. First in line, I have Alderman Bird, please.

▶ 36:19 Jaclyn L. Bird: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for being here tonight. I absolutely will support this order this evening. I'm happy to see this come together. This is something that I hope members of the public realize has been in the works for quite some time. And one of the things that I was concerned about when we first started talking about how, maybe not first started talking about, but when we started talking about how to address the needs of technology upgrades, specifically in the schools, about a year and a half ago, we talked about having an audit and trying to get a handle on what do we already have in the schools? What kinds of things can we use as those resources? Are they all completely outdated? How do we leverage what we already have and make sure that we didn't make an impulsive purchase just to fill the void. So I want to applaud the work that's gone into this. I think that between the technology surveys and the groups that have met from what I've read here, I think you've put in the time and you've put in the work that I was hoping to see when we first started talking about this. But at the same time, I want residents who maybe don't have children or grandchildren in the schools right now to understand that some of the most recent technology purchases, at least at the elementary level, have been funded through the PTOs. And even though we're hoping for a successful Hoover School golf tournament next week, it's not really a sustainable revenue source. So to have $10,000 spent on Chromebooks last year, I don't even think it's worthy of calling that a band-aid. So we appreciate the efforts, I think, that groups like that have put forth. But it's time for us to, it's past time for us to do this, and I don't want to spend time on why we haven't done it in the past. But I do want to commend you on the work that's been done, and I'm happy to support it, and I think we need to do it. So that's all, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

▶ 38:13 Peter D. Mortimer: Thank you, Alderman Byrd. Next we have Alderman Inferno, please.

▶ 38:18 Gail Infurna: thank you very much mr. chairman I thought somewhere along the line I was down the list a little bit I just have a couple of simple questions because technology is not my forte per se but when you mentioned that that you would be hooking up the HVAC and the heating with you know all this equipment in my mind and maybe the public it will help the public understand why we need this so importantly that would certainly decrease our utility bills for the schools, I would assume, if they can be done technology or electronically-wise with the computers?

▶ 38:51 Speaker 4: That is correct. What typically ends up happening is we implement either at the middle school lighting systems, or we have HVAC systems that were put in as part of the green community project. And a lot of those systems, if you look at the middle school, that computer is eight years old that is running the lighting systems. it's not terribly reliable and it's past its useful life and that that causes issues for the folks that are trying to manage something as simple as lighting at the middle school so having some type of a plan with a defined replacement period for all of this equipment gives a little bit of certainty and a little bit

▶ 39:34 Gail Infurna: of stability to that environment and leasing we it certainly sounds like with leasing we would be saving the money i'm sorry with leasing this equipment we'd be saving money yes we would you know through this and with technology it always seems like when you get a new notebook or laptop or anything it seems like just by the time you get used to using it and everything it's really passe and outdated so with leasing it would that be um fiscally responsible of us to have the leasing so that when it gets replaced and we're not just kind of hanging on to it because it's it's old and we have to use it that's correct you know

▶ 40:11 Speaker 4: i mean we'd be able to the i the idea is that at the end of the five-year lease this equipment would then be replaced returned and replaced uh with newer equipment um at that time so a five-year replacement cycle i think is an appropriate balance between uh having something that's fiscally responsible uh and something that is functional over that course of that time within

▶ 40:32 Gail Infurna: It's been that five years not to be passing, okay. Thank you very much, and thank you again for all your work on this. As I said, this is absolutely not my forte at all, and I appreciate that you have been working on this for a long time, and this is moving forward in the right direction, so thanks.

▶ 40:49 Peter D. Mortimer: Thank you. Thank you, Alderman Inferno. Next in line, we have President Kahn, please.

▶ 40:57 Speaker 1: Yeah, so Mr. De La Russo, just to try to simplify this, So the funding source of this is essentially the general fund, is that not correct? That is correct. So this is part of our current year operating budget? That is correct. And as we go forward over these next five years, are you going to build the budget next year with a line item for these entities? Yes, with the chair exactly the same as we do for, for example, the police vehicle lease. years we're going to same line item in budget on 931 it'll be sitting there each and every year for five years provided the board approves it each and every year for five years yeah it's easy for me if it's nice and simple and we have them in a line so from here on in we're going to have a line for school side technology and a line for city side technology that's correct right in that same budget that's correct okay so so the public needs to understand that this is this is general funds money part of operating budget we are not not borrowing in any way uh to fund these expenditures

▶ 42:09 Speaker 1: absolutely not and um i gotta tell you mr pesos i i love post project briefing i think that people out there are going to rue the day that you threw that term out there because i my mind is filled with post project briefings that i want to fire orders on now i think I think I have a new toy to play with here now, Mr. Chairman.

▶ 42:28 Speaker 2: That's all I have right now. Thank you, President Kahn.

▶ 42:32 Peter D. Mortimer: Next in line, we have Alderman Lemmerman, please.

▶ 42:34 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much for all of this information and for coming on to speak to us. I just have a few questions. I, as well as Alderman Inferno said, I'm certainly not super tech savvy, but do have a few questions from what I've read here. I guess just starting out on the higher level, Mr. Pesos, I was hoping you could help us, particularly on the city side. You know, I read the strategic plan. I feel like I have a pretty good sense from the school's plan of the need. But looking at the one in here and then looking at, say, the survey results, which certainly have room for improvement but weren't awful, when you say this is something we desperately need, can you make that more concrete for me can you talk to me about if we don't do this are there city services we won't be able to provide um what we will we be missing what won't work adequately

▶ 43:29 Speaker 4: so i'll give you a couple of concrete examples we have engineering computers downstairs there's quite a bit of engineering work going on as i'm sure you've noticed and we have engineering computers downstairs that have to share a version of cad they have to share engineers have to share the computer in order to access CAD because CAD is a an intensive program that requires a high-end computer and they don't have enough high-end computers down there so when they want to work on CAD they have they have multiple engineers accessing CAD and sharing a computer which is not great especially during a very busy season of construction at the police station we have computers that are in excess of six years old and they frequently have the dreaded blue screen of death this happens to the patrol commander which for obvious reasons is not good as he's trying to prepare reports either for a 9-1-1 or a whole host of reports so I mean those are two pretty critical pretty critical positions we have the same type of scenario and the fire departments it's particularly the two outside departments really old computers that you really need replacement and are not getting replaced so that's the type of thing that you're looking at and then of course we deal with the regular phone calls from folks in all departments across the city that their computer is extremely slow and we really don't have a good answer for that because the answer is it's a really old computer and you're trying you are trying to do 2015 work in 2008 technology so those are those are probably the most concrete examples that I can give you and they're pretty critical in my mind they're

▶ 45:14 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: pretty critical positions and so it looks like between the Chromebooks and the iPads that's about 1,700 pieces of equipment if I'm doing it is that every piece of equipment we currently have in the being is everything getting replaced

▶ 45:31 Speaker 4: citywide is this an increase do we have it is it is an increase and really what you're you're seeing is on the school side the Chromebooks are what are bearing the brunt of that increase and we're doing that for a variety of reasons one is the management costs of Chromebooks are really nothing next to nothing for us and that they have a really long shelf life the end of life on the Dell Chromebook 11s extend out to the spring of 2020, which means that Google promises to support and provide software updates for that device until at least that date. They typically go beyond the end-of-life date. So this brings us right to the end of this lease. And the Dell Chromebook 11s have been well regarded for their durability. So that's what you're seeing there is an increase in the majority of that. And you'll see that there are not a lot of, actually, there are not a lot of PCs being purchased through this. That's because the majority of what we're doing is based on Chromebooks.

▶ 46:33 Speaker 3: The other thing is, if you remember correctly from the school's technology assessment and plan, we set a goal of a three-to-one system, not a one-to-one system. We felt a one-to-one system was beyond our capacity in terms of not only equipment, broadband, and everything else, but financially. So we have set a goal of three-to-one, so that's part of it. By going to the Chromebooks, it's much more doable. You see the differences in the price. The Chromebooks are, what, a third of the price of the PCs. But it's also the mobility of the Chromebooks so that we can take them from room to room. The kids can move around the buildings with them. it's it's becoming the device that we're seeing in more school systems every year even more than iPads because iPads have a shorter shelf life and to Alderman Byrd's comment before which we appreciate and we appreciate your support and of course the support 18 months ago when I raised the question of the assessment is what the PTO's allowed us to do was basically R&D they allowed us to test out how this would work with our kids and the feedback we received from families children and teachers drove the decision even more to

▶ 47:53 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: go to the Chromebooks and Horace Mann I know is one of the schools I was at the PTO meeting that you were presenting to about that option so I know that the PTO have picked up a lot of that over the last couple of years you bring up a point that I have a question on which is the Chromebooks and the Google products and their affordability their portability obviously I have an iPad I am an iPad user I like iPads but they're I think the most expensive option for a tablet so I'm wondering about doing iPads and you know I went on Amazon as I was reading this order and googled the iPad that is you know being bid on and I can buy it on Amazon for 371 dollars so we're not even really getting a discount because here they're $379 in our quote so I'm just wondering if you can speak to that a little bit about the decision to go with the iPad so this is a pretty

▶ 48:47 Speaker 4: interesting point you'll notice that there are a variety of quotes in the Apple iPad quote that I've provided to you is a separate quote I provided it in the spreadsheet so that you'd see it as a total in the state of Massachusetts under the state contract the only perk the only entity that you can buy an Apple product from if you are an educational institution is Apple Direct and Apple Direct does not really give you great pricing so that is our that is the only show in town and that is our only choice that is probably part of the reason that you see a lot of school districts moving away from Apple products and going towards Chromebooks so that's the that's the blunt answer that is why that is and we can't buy legally under procurement law from

▶ 49:34 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Amazon so I guess going back to the Google point though I was just wondering if was the Google Nexus looked at or something that's gonna be we looked yeah

▶ 49:42 Speaker 4: we looked at a lot of yeah we I even piloted I went so far as to pilot a Microsoft Surface which got eliminated pretty quickly but we looked at a variety of different Chromebook options as well within the whole Chromebook family so we looked at Dell Chromebooks we looked at a whole suite of HP Chromebooks we looked at Lenovo Chromebooks and in terms of cost in durability the Dell Chromebook 11s really were the better choice we did look at iPads as well again there's a lot of issues around the actual use of an iPad particularly for content creation a Chromebook is pretty familiar it's just like a like a laptop for for most kids they'll look at it and think of it as a laptop an iPad has issues around content creation where you pop up that screen now all of a sudden your half of your screen is taken up by the keyboard so there's some usability issues around that particularly at younger grades iPads are great for younger grades and that's what we're targeting them for the case so and then you have other issues that you can add a wireless keyboard to the iPad but now that's a second device that the teacher has to make sure it's charged so there's all those sorts of little things that really at the end of the day make you say the Chromebook is just a much

▶ 50:57 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: simpler deployment sure and then just one last question if I'm reading all right I see the school breakdown they've you know a line for student computers there's a certain number of student computers for every school except it looks like the high school are there no student computers high school so let me

▶ 51:27 Speaker 4: explain the high school deployment schedule just a little bit so what you're looking at at the high school we already have Chromebooks at the high school we have science computers that were purchased for the science wing project those computers are not scheduled to be replaced as part of this project we also have some labs that are part of the of the sorry the Resource Center renovation project and some of the Learning Commons of the Learning Commons project and and some of those will be purchased in there we We specifically do not want to buy those computers now because they would literally sit in a box or be used for a year and then we open up a brand new learning commons with computers that are a year old. So we want to hold off on purchasing those. Great.

▶ 52:16 Jennifer L. Lemmerman: Okay. That's all my questions. Thank you very much.

▶ 52:19 Peter D. Mortimer: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Alderman Lemmerman. Next, we have Alderman Boisselle, please.

▶ 52:24 Robert A. Boisselle: Well, just continuing on with that, in the deployment schedule for students who have 300 Chromebooks, are those the ones that are in place now?

▶ 52:31 Speaker 4: No. These would be in addition to —

▶ 52:34 Robert A. Boisselle: this is so these are new Chromebooks will be the new what's here it will be new Chromebooks coming into the system besides what's in the science in the lab

▶ 52:42 Speaker 4: correct so all of these deployment schedules represent what we are buying out of that quote that's why at the post briefing we can go over what's actually there in those places if that's one of the items that we'd like to cover at that point in time but there are and there are Chromebooks and iPads in use across the district in other schools so so for example at the at the Hoover School they have 30 iPads and we're buying an additional 15 to support them so at the what these spreadsheets represent is what we are buying well

▶ 53:18 Robert A. Boisselle: we'll talk about the spreadsheets in a moment okay thank you for coming it's very interesting documentation is a good to 200 240 pages I believe quite a bit of it in the opening you talked about where these computers are going within the system and you named off a number of areas but in the deployment schedule I see that the senior center in the library is not receiving any computers

▶ 53:56 Speaker 4: so the library funds itself through the noble network so we do not provide them computers what we provide them is network access so they can access uh things on this side such as munis and things like that okay how about the senior center so for the senior center um they are getting five administrative pcs um five i have zero here oh i'm sorry i'm council on aging

▶ 54:20 Speaker 4: the senior center itself we are not putting any computers okay in the scene i just want to make

▶ 54:26 Robert A. Boisselle: make sure that I saw that and I was wondering if there was a double entry at this point.

▶ 54:31 Speaker 4: No, and they, and they, they buy and support their own lab there that, that they use.

▶ 54:38 Speaker 1: Okay, good.

▶ 54:42 Robert A. Boisselle: In the network infrastructure, I mean, you had the Merrill's Public School and the technology leadership recommending 200 between 200 and hundred megabytes and the connection speed of one gigabyte of information are you going to have enough for that I mean the documentation starting from page 140 on we're only talking about gigabytes terabytes I mean you're they're way up here in information but why you seem to be at the low end of the so let me let

▶ 55:23 Speaker 4: me it's on page 27 300 what that represents what the because we have one gig and 10 gig yep what that represents so the two to three hundred megabyte make a bit number that that we're talking about is actual access out to the internet right from from our point of premise here that recommendation was not something that we just stumbled on to that is actually part of a A spreadsheet is provided through the Park Initiative. And what they allow you to do is go in there and you put in your number of students, number of computers. And it's a spreadsheet that calculates what your bandwidth out to the internet needs to be. The two to 300 megabit number is the number that we need to be doing business. That means kids accessing the internet all day long, multimedia intensive access to the internet. supporting online testing at the same time so that's what that two to three hundred number so really that 300 megabit number for this district is the worst case amount of bandwidth that we would need to get out to the internet according to Park okay the 10 gig and the one gig what we do is we have our own fiber network most of these locations are already connected at one gig we are making some upgrades between here and the high school to have that completely go over to 10 gig and break that the high school up a little bit because the high school is a really big animal so you are increasing beyond the

▶ 56:52 Speaker 4: one gig but that now that's only internal network traffic about going out

▶ 56:56 Speaker 1: you're going to have enough we should because that's that that's that

▶ 57:00 Speaker 4: calculation process that we went through that showed us that two to three hundred megabits is what we need to support teaching learning and online testing all

▶ 57:13 Robert A. Boisselle: right i'll go along with that at this time but i i still think you're at the low end of i will we should be looking towards the future where i guess the kindergarten class you had registered of almost 1600 kids coming in and we're just looking for the future that we're not just going to be doing this again in five years and uploading again all right um the questionnaires were really interesting but I had a couple questions on that in the one question how would you describe your department relationship with the IT department and you had a 45% response IT is generally helpful but must be actively engaged with to help us achieve our department and organizing organizational goals could you explain that what that means so what we're

▶ 58:06 Speaker 4: trying to get get at there is do departments feel that we are proactive about trying to get engage them and solve their problems do they look at us as active partners pulling them in and pushing them along or do they feel like they need to come to us and say hey we really need your help here we're trying to gauge how helpful we're perceived by staff across the city so I think the And the majority of that is reasonably encouraging. There's always room for improvement. If you call our office at any one point in time, it's likely that we're already helping somebody. It's the age old issue of customer service. Is that a challenge?

▶ 58:51 Speaker 1: Are you saying you're understaffed?

▶ 58:53 Speaker 4: No, I don't think that we're understaffed, but I will tell you that when you're fielding several phone calls a day, the answer is yes your computer is very old it causes more phone calls than you need so perhaps maybe the issue isn't staffing the issue is the equipment that

▶ 59:11 Robert A. Boisselle: people are using very good interesting and reading the charts and so forth and looking at all the pie charts when you look at a pie chart for instance how would you describe your office telephone you have four different colors but you only have three explanations it'd be interesting to have all the explanations on that i believe it's probably the space adjustments on the output it is and i and i

▶ 59:34 Speaker 4: had not realized that that the last one just got chopped off of the graph so i do apologize for that i can resubmit these so that they show those all of them just put a record in for public access

▶ 59:43 Robert A. Boisselle: uh for keep it open uh in the deployment areas it was interesting until i got into into, first of all, you have administration PC, student PCs, then all of a sudden I ran into Chrome carts and iPad carts. And then you had a picture of all the carts with all their PCs in them. Correct. It was given the impression that under Chromebook cart 300, you're getting 300 Chromebook, 300 carts filled with Chromebooks. Was there a particular reason why you changed the terminology halfway through the deployment schedule?

▶ 1:00:32 Speaker 4: No, there is no particular reason. I think that's just a bad word choice that at some point just didn't carry across all of the spreadsheets. So just to be clear, when we say 100, we're not talking 100 Chromebook carts. We're talking about 100 Chromebooks in carts. And I realize that that's potentially pretty confusing, and I apologize for that. so and also when you look at the specification sheets and has a picture of the cart i know that that the some of those pictures show for so for example you if you do the math four carts 100 chromebooks it's 25 chromebooks per cart if you look at the picture it may show 15 it may show 30 capacity on those carts those carts come in different capacity so those specification sheets are just showing a picture for illustration we're buying what is the 27 because that's the size that

▶ 1:01:32 Robert A. Boisselle: it comes in the 27 unit chromebook cards just to there was a question concerning the cost of the ipads and so forth i guess in the financial pages that came out this week amazon is getting into the educational ipad for 50 bucks uh an ipad they're they're going to be coming out sometime this fall with their demonstration of it so for how good it is I have no idea at this point also since we're into this Chromebooks area in the Google area you go into the Google website and you bring up their education department and there's tons of material there for the educators plus they also have contractors that will show you how to work this out when you mention outside contractors are you talking about these people coming in and so forth and doing this type of work coming in for a year just on contract and then leaving

▶ 1:02:28 Speaker 4: afterwards you know that would that would be more something in the area of professional development that's handled by the school department directly when we're talking about contractors coming in we're talking about folks that are going to be taking ceiling tiles down and running wiring for us to installation infrastructure correct and that's that's labor-intensive and time-consuming that's something that we need to just farm out or else it would we would be talking about February of 2017 if it was just the six men staff

▶ 1:02:57 Robert A. Boisselle: members running all that wiring so very good good luck thank you thank you very much for coming this evening and I do support the strategy thank you very much

▶ 1:03:05 Peter D. Mortimer: thank you thank you alderman Boycelle may we now hear from alderman Medeiros

▶ 1:03:10 Monica C. Medeiros: please Thank You mr. chairman mr. de la Rosa this was in the original budget proposal that was presented to us is that correct and then it wasn't quite ready for presentation and we took it out so this is something that too i just want to point out for the public yeah

▶ 1:03:26 Speaker 1: absolutely thank you for bringing that up because maybe perhaps someone didn't realize that thank

▶ 1:03:33 Monica C. Medeiros: you yeah and um and mr pesos uh this is a lease this is over five years are we having any kind of replacement of the equipment within those five years are we going to be you know at the end of the five years all all the equipment completely goes away or is there any kind of like option to own if we wanted to own I'm not sure that we would yes when what happens as equipment fails what are the kind of fail-safes that are in place so most of so all the majority

▶ 1:04:07 Speaker 4: of equipment is all dollar buyout so it's a dollar to buy everything out or you can just return it you don't incur that dollar buyout and then you can renew the lease so there is a reasonable exit strategy after five years in terms of support these come with standard support on state contract and additionally we do carry a small maintenance repair both on the city side and the school side that would cover anything that's sort of outside of that standard support okay so the one of the

▶ 1:04:41 Speaker 3: things that we worked on when we were piloting not only the chromebooks but the e-readers that we have at the middle school was a contract with families obviously accidents happen with kids you know it's in your backpack you throw your backpack on the floor five other backpacks landed on top of it and that's the end of that and in the contracts with families we talked about neglect and abuse you know accidents happen that's just what it is when you have equipment with students but I will tell you I think the Chromebooks we've only had what two replacements I've only had deal with two two so um the kids are pretty respectful they love having them they understand how serious we are we're all taking this so we hope that carries forward thank you uh and i'm

▶ 1:05:33 Monica C. Medeiros: glad to see this in our budget as as something that you know we're looking forward to with a real plan um and definitely i know a couple of the aldermen have touched upon you know just how generous the PTOs have been and is this something are we going to continue to we expect that we're going to continue to need to rely on their generosity for

▶ 1:06:00 Speaker 3: technology the PTOs originally approached me Altamir Medeiros because they had they had money and they were frustrated with the fact that we were unable to buy so there was a lot of conversation back and forth some PTOs were more willing some wanted to have more a better understanding um so they're they they're very generous across the board in many ways um you know uh i've the um i'm drawing a blank i think it's the lincoln or the roosevelt pto right now want to talk about how they can improve their sound system at in their audit you know their multi-purpose room so they are very generous and they're looking to help us out wherever they can as was said earlier it was never the intent for them to buy a pay for a three to one roll up in technology but we really needed to get started somewhere and to see what worked best with our students most of you have heard me speak in the passed the old model was the lab you match the kids down to the lab the kids not it was not organic it wasn't automatic with kids and we had to get to a mobile situation and this allowed us to pilot that and see how well it worked and it really does work extremely well I would also like to add that my approach

▶ 1:07:23 Speaker 4: to the PTOs and when I've spoken to PTOs is I would like them to act more as venture capitalists creating laboratories of learning so doing things that are not what we're supposed to be providing so something something as crazy as we want to do a 3d printer we want to do something special we want to do something that's a little bit outside the norm to see how that works in education education and how it works here and maybe that's something that we learn from and incorporate in in later years when we go to renew these agreements and purchase new equipment that's the approach I'd like to take with them I don't don't like the idea of having the PTO's basically fund what

▶ 1:08:13 Monica C. Medeiros: should be in our operating budget my opinion yes definitely and you know certainly over the years they can speak to you know horseman has bought laptop carts and then a smart board which then led us to fund smart boards in all of the elementary schools so i mean certainly that has been the role you know over time and so

▶ 1:08:37 Speaker 5: i just i want to thank them again and thank you for putting this in thank you thank you alderman

▶ 1:08:45 Robert A. Boisselle: medeiros alderman boys help please with all these computers floating around especially the portable ones and so forth is there going to be any specific type of security someone rolls one of these carts out one night and so forth and you got 25 of these out out there being sold uh is there a security section here that we should be aware of or you shouldn't be telling us there

▶ 1:09:06 Speaker 4: is built within google so we're all the google apps for education district uh and built into google apps there are a variety of things that you can do to secure those uh you can do something that's called forced re-enrollment so we enroll all of these chromebooks and that basically allows us to manage and there's all sorts of things you can do you can set the time zone you can set who can log into the thing you can just set whether or not guests can log in and use the Chromebook and one of the things that you can do is this forced re-enrollment so that if I were to steal this Chromebook and take it home and then try to wipe it when it comes back up it says I have to re-enroll myself so that's one method there's also a lot of freely available tools that we use to track physically track where equipment is and we would be using that

▶ 1:09:54 Robert A. Boisselle: as well all right you're also deploying a great number of computers what's happening to the old

▶ 1:10:00 Speaker 4: computers so a majority of the computers will probably need to be uh disposed of because a lot of them are well beyond their their useful life we have and i think we're going to go as far back as the summer of 2012 we purchased 50 new computers for the horseman i think that those computers are still within that six year time frame that we set on the on the district side for computers so we'll reuse those in spots there were 40 purchased in 2013 for the roosevelt same thing we will try to reuse those and then in 2014 we shifted and purchased chromebooks for the middle school so we'll just obviously continue to use those as well but anything older than that purchased prior to that so there's a lot that were purchased for example at the middle school during the middle school projects some of those are really beyond their useful life now

▶ 1:10:51 Robert A. Boisselle: Now, these portables are going to be stationed in the schools. They're not going to be traveling with the students and so forth.

▶ 1:10:57 Speaker 4: They won't be going home if that's your question.

▶ 1:11:00 Robert A. Boisselle: Okay. All right, thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

▶ 1:11:03 Peter D. Mortimer: Thank you, Alderman Boisselle. Alderman Medeiros, please.

▶ 1:11:06 Monica C. Medeiros: Thank you, sorry. Alderman Boisselle sparked a couple other thoughts in my mind. In terms of getting rid of old computers, obviously we must do that in an environmentally friendly way. And there, I assume it's a pretty significant cost probably these days in doing so.

▶ 1:11:24 Speaker 4: Are we? There are organizations that handle e-waste for public school districts and it's free. So we've used them for a number of years whenever we have to dispose of anything that is e-waste. So and they recycle them and they're supposed to do that in a responsible way.

▶ 1:11:44 Monica C. Medeiros: My other question is about the shared applications and one of the reasons that makes Google Chromebooks so appealing is that you can have these shared documents and data sort of stored somewhere

▶ 1:12:06 Speaker 5: on the cloud do we lose you know did it in terms of rights of you know if the

▶ 1:12:12 Monica C. Medeiros: student writes a paper or creativity thought is there anything to protect the intellectual property rights of what is created on those computers or lesson plans from teachers and does Google have any right to really kind of look at those documents and what kind of security is around that data so one of

▶ 1:12:35 Speaker 4: the interesting things about Google is if you as a private citizen were to go and get a gmail account you are subject to quite a bit of data mining you're subject to quite a bit of advertising they mind the data to target the advertising to you as a Google Apps for edu they have specifically changed what they do there so when teachers or students log into their Google accounts and I encourage people to go home, if they have kids or know of kids in the district, have them log into their Gmail account and then log into your own, and you will notice that the kids' accounts, teachers' accounts, they have no advertising because Google handles that very differently because they realize that that would be probably the most scary, the scariest thing for a lot of parents. That would be very unnerving. So their policies are very different around that. They don't serve ads. It is very limited data mining that occurs there. So from that perspective, I think we're okay. What was your other question? I'm sorry.

▶ 1:13:41 Speaker 5: Just like does Google, do they have any rights to the data that we upload there? No. And in what kinds of security? I mean, is there that some outside entity won't kind of hack into that?

▶ 1:13:53 Speaker 3: Well, you can't prevent hacking. well yeah so what I will say is that have it then so can we I guess what I

▶ 1:14:03 Speaker 4: will say is that that Google is certified to from a security perspective there are a variety of federal level regulations around security and they have achieved those so they're certified for that so theoretically the NSA could have a Google Apps environment for themselves and it would be certified secure for that purpose thank you thank you all the Medeiros who's got it it's

▶ 1:14:37 Peter D. Mortimer: gonna make the motion motion to recommend second we have an all we have a motion to recommend this order for passage from alderman Inferno duly seconded by alderman Byrd seeing no further discussion all in favor please Please say aye. Aye. Any opposed?

▶ 1:14:53 Peter D. Mortimer: Hearing none, the motion passes and this order will be recommended to the full board for passage at our next full board meeting. Ostensibly, you need not attend if there is some outrageous situation, some of the aldermen or our clerk or committees would call you back. But due to the extensive nature of the questioning tonight, I think that we should be all set. Very good job, Alderman, very thorough questions, and great job from the members of the administration.