Springfield School District has a great support system for technology!  Besides an innovative Director of Technology (Mike Holinga, who is retiring next year) and a new CTER1 graduate, Sue Ruff, who is becoming the new Director of Technology, there is a team of technology experts.  There is a Computer Services office consisting of six staff members, including one computer maintenance and support technician and three other techs.  The District 186 Website and web based Data System Development is supported by a staff of two.  Project Lincol'n and Teacher Instructional Leaders are also a great resource with their staff of three.  The three TIL's are resources that go into each school building and provide inservice training with school staff.
       Each school develops their own set of technology needs and schedules three or four days of  technology  inservice training for teachers each school year.  At Fairview Elementary School this past year, Cindy Huson had four inservices mostly based on using the new District 186 Intranet so teachers will be able to implement this in the fall of 2000.  Substitute teachers are provided for the classroom teachers (for periods of 1 1/2 hours each training day).  Cost for this training are taken from the Technology budgets.

        Technology Support help begins with a troubleshooting check (provided in Troubleshooting, Section 4).  Our school technology team is then notified.  One staff member is especially knowledgeable in being able to check the networking glitches.  If problems persist, we can call or e-mail Computer Services to get an answer.  If that does not correct the problem, one technician, Dave Schumer, makes regularly scheduled on-site visits to each school building to fix problems.  We log our problems in a conveniently located notebook (beneath the mailboxes) and problems are taken care of in a timely manner.
        By calling Computer Services (525-3289) teachers can reach a technician to answer questions.  The technology staff can also be reached at any time by 2-way radios.  They can then return your call quickly and you do not have to wait until the following day.  Computer Services are available all year long except on holidays.  The office is even open during Spring Break and Christmas Break (limited staff).  Several of the technology staff live in the area and are available by phone any time (they purposely have their numbers listed in the District 186 Directory).

                                      Back up Servers

        Every other day, a backup is done of the mail server, the web server and other District 186 level servers.  Individual schools are responsible for maintaining any backups of their on-site servers. However, Fairview Elementary does not have any on-site servers.

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