As most of you know, our district is planning to ask our community to renew the 2004 capital levy on May 20th. We are asking for less money than in 2004, hence property owners will see their taxes decrease. Information about this has been sent to all households in our district (the blue Edmonds School District News) and the district continues to look for more ways to get information out to interested parties.

Since Technology is emphasized on this capital levy, I wanted to make sure that you have access to details of our plans. Therefore, you can:
• Read the summary that I have included below
• Attend the SET meeting on March 3rd (see info below)
• Ask me any questions you may have


Save the Date - Monday, March 3
for your School-Support Election Team
Kickoff Meeting
o 4:00 to 4:30 p.m. Arrival Time - Food Available!
o 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. Program & Presentation
o Meadowdale High School – Great Hall

The Replacement Levy Funds:
Technology ($ 24M) and Capital Facilities improvements ($ 7.5M)

Things to know about the $ 24M for Technology:
• $ 2 M has been designated for infrastructure upgrades to meet electrical needs – more technology has increased our need for electrical power in our classrooms
• We are planning on replacing all computers (except for CTE labs) on a 4-5 year replacement cycle
o Examples include: school office manager, custodian, principal, field technician, accounts payable, etc.
• Network upgrades include: wireless LAN upgrades for better tuning of radios, district website content management system, data storage servers, collaboration servers (like SharePoint), network access control (to allow non-district computers on our network, safely)
• We will be funding a Middle School technology education program so all of our 8th graders can meet the State standards
• We will replace computers in high school desktop computer labs and school libraries
• We will replace projectors, document cameras and staff laptops
• We will replace (969 computers) and increase (1,776 computers) the number of mobile labs in our schools
• We will replace (1,062 computers) and increase (1,334 computers) the number of student tech tools classrooms in our district
• We will provide schools with funding (/student FTE/year) to meet site-specific technology needs
• We have designated 0K for eLearning and 0K for curriculum-related technology tools
• We will be increasing funding for professional development and technical support

As we end our first month using our new phone system, I hope most of you have gotten comfortable with the new phones and voice messages appearing in your email Inbox. I also hope that you are discovering some of the new features that can make your day-to-day work easier. There have been some questions that have been asked frequently, so I thought I would provide some additional information.

Q. Someone told me that they called 411 and was given (425) 670-xxxx as our phone number. When this is dialed, they get a busy signal. Why isn't there a message that we changed our phone number to (425) 431-xxxx?

A. We changed our phone prefix in June 2006. We communicated this change to as many people as we could in a variety of ways (District newsletters, press releases, parent newsletters, etc.), and have discovered that it is challenging to get all sources that store our phone numbers to change them. Here is a list of some places where people get our phone number:

• 411 services for phone service providers (for example, if you call 411 from Renton, you get a different service than if you call 411 from Edmonds)
• Internet web pages that provide phone directories or information about our district (for example, if you search "whitepages.com" you get the 431-prefix, but on "greatschools.net" you get the 670-prefix)
• Business cards that are more than a couple of years old
• Stored phone numbers in cell phones
• Phone lists posted on refrigerators

For this reason, we left the main school/department phone numbers with the 670-prefix active for the entire 2006-07 school year and the beginning of the 2007-08 year. This cost the district approximately $ 1,000.

We explored the option of putting a message on these 80 phone numbers that would tell the caller that our number has been changed. This would have cost the district over $ 2,000 per month. We determined that this was not good use of district funds, since we have little control over where people find our phone number.

Q. When checking voice mail, sometimes it takes a long time. Is this because the system is overloaded?

A. We have been experiencing periods when the Unity server (voice mail) is slow to respond. Some of this is because of the number of changes that we continue to make to the system. We are, though, continuing to look for the cause of this situation. The servers that we purchased are properly sized for an organization similiar to ours, so we do not think it is a hardware capacity issue at this time.

Q. I see that I have voice messages in my email, but when I use my phone to listen to them, it says that I have no messages. What is happening?

A. When you view the messages in your email box, it marks the message as "saved". This happens even if you don't actually listen to the message. When looking at your email Inbox, the message will go from being bold to regular text. You have a few options in this situation:

• If you don’t actually listen to the message via your computer, and want to hear it via the phone, then mark it as Unread – to do this either click on the icon that says “Mark as Unread” or right-click and choose “Mark as Unread”
• You can also check your "old" messages by logging into voicemail, then pressing 3, then 1 for "saved messages", or
• Buy an inexpensive pair of headphones and listen to your voice messages while going through your email. This method does give you the flexibility of listening to messages in a random order instead of in the order that they were received. Additionally, it eliminates the need to login to a different system to get your voice messages.

Cynthia Nelson
Technology Director

The Edmonds School District is switching the prefix on all of its phone and fax numbers. All numbers beginning with “670” will become “431” numbers this summer. In fact, the “431” numbers already work. You can use them right now!

The change is taking place for several reasons, the most important being safety. With the “431” numbers, when someone in a school dials emergency services, they will be able to track the number directly to a specific classroom at a school. This will help emergency services greatly during their response.

Key points to remember:

· All “670” district numbers will become “431” numbers. For example, 425-670-7000 will become 425-431-7000.

· All district numbers are now direct-dial numbers. A teacher no longer needs to be reached by dialing 425-670-7311 extension 1234, for example. Rather, the teacher could be reached directly at 425-431-1234.

· There will be a grace period. Although most “670” numbers will be turned off at the end of September 2006, all school main office phone numbers and other key district numbers will be reachable by either “670” or “431” through the 2006-07 school year.

[Submitted by brayd]

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