Episode 1: Rising to the Challenge - Wayne Twp COVID Response feat. CTO Pete Just

Transcription:Zack: Today's episode we’ll be tuning into a conversation I recently had with Pete Just, Chief Technology Officer for the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township in Indianapolis as we looked back at March and how this large school district took on all the various challenges of the pandemic.Pete: ...But we didn’t have enough devices to take care of all those primary students because five or four in a room doesn't take care of the 22 students that might be in there, so there's a problem. The students went home in two days. We didn't have time to get their chromebooks out of the carts or know that they were charged. Or we had to get the adapters out of the carts. That took a couple of days. So what we were doing, we were doing a system where the parents were picking up packets and we called it packet distribution and we eventually wove in you could pick up your chromebooks when you pick up your packets this week. So we did get the chromebooks out that were in carts, but we were short on all the preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade devices and we didn't have any for the high school. So in the month of April we had a program that we had been running for probably 14 years called ‘Bridging the Gap’, and basically what we did with that program was we said, “Look, we've got a bunch of 5 year old computers. They don't work well on the network anymore, but, you know what, they probably (if we load up some freeware and took them back to their original OS) we could give them to you. So the board approved that 15 years ago. So we had been doing that. So we started using chromebooks we had started at either 3 or 4 years-- basically ‘Bridging the Gap’ was a part of the chromebook program. So if you were in high school or junior high, after 3 years that became part of your family, if you will. And in elementary school where they were in carts, we got an extra year out of them and after 4 years they would become part of ‘Bridging the Gap’. So we did have some of those out in the community. And we had a number of other devices in carts. And we started giving those out to high school students and specifically targeting seniors because we didn’t want our seniors falling behind in the spring. So we had set up, basically, some lines to do-- our high school is the biggest one of, well, either the biggest or second biggest depending on when renovations happen on any given year-- high school in the state. It’s the largest high school in the state, let’s just say. So we have a lot of doors, a lot of drives that go by different areas of the school. So we chose some of those to do a repair exchange program for students where we had hardware breaks and we basically took that broken device, gave them another one and just did an exchange because that was fast. And we would have anywhere from 70 to 250 of those in a 3 hour period. And at another door, if you were a senior, we would give you a chromebook-- or it was an older laptop that had a cloud ready OS on it. And we would give that to you and that was just yours to do your work with. So we just slowly started finding ways to repair devices that were broken so that students could stay engaged with the online components. And then we slowly started getting things out the door for the high school students. So, in a nutshell, that all was an evolution of how we could support our students. And, of course, the ones that were broken we work with you guys at K12 Tech to get repaired and then those went back into rotation to be exchanged. So that kind of summarizes how the spring went. I’ll pause for a minuteZack: Yeah, so I want to break up a little bit of what you said. And the big thing and one thing I really loved about what you did in your guys’ organization was getting-- these new students that were working from home-- getting them hotspots. So can you explain how that worked? Did that come through the state? Did you work with...