Politics & Government

By Sharing Technology, Town, Schools To Save $150,000

The new system will link all town and school buildings and provide enable departments and schools to communicate more smoothly.

The town and the school department have come up with a way to consolidate their technology infrastructure, which has been separate up until now. The new single system will cost $150,000 less than replacing the two separate systems, Supt. Victor Mercurio told the School Committee Tuesday.

Here's how Wendy Schmidle, the town's technology director, explained it recently: 

"We both needed to refresh our phone systems, so instead of refreshing two, we're going to refresh one. Internal communication will be easier and it's going to reduce maintenance costs."

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The "refresh" isn't the phones themselves, but the servers, or as Schmidle calls it, the brains of the operation. This will also bring fiber cables to all the municipal and school buildings in town – currently only some of the buildings have fiber. [Editor's note: This paragraph was added at 8:15 a.m., Oct. 18.]

Schmidle, who's long envisioned such a collaboration, said it came about now after Town Councilor Jeff Cianciolo took notice during budget discussions with the School Committee last year that they were planning to upgrade their phone system. So was the town. Schmidle and EGSD technology director Carlos Zambrano got to work.

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"We'd built two 'roads' for this," said Schmidle about the phone/communication system. "We've had to unwind the two systems and put them back together as one system that we share."

Under the new plan, there will be two "campuses," one covering all the town and school buildings east of South County Trail, the other covering Frenchtown School, the Parks & Rec Department, the Fire Department's Station Two, and the Public Works building at Bear Swamp Road. 

The new system will provide video surveillance from the schools to the Police Department. 

"By redoing the pathway, we can add the schools and the only real costs will be cameras for the schools," said Schmidle.

While this consolidation will save money both in the replacement costs and over time, there is an outlay of cash that's required. 

According to Supt. Mercurio, the cost to replace two phone systems would be $461,000. The cost to replace the two systems with one system is $310,000. 

On the school side, the money will come from $40,000 already in the fiscal year 2014 budget for phone system replacement and $179,000 left over from the $52 million in bonds issued to pay for Cole Middle School and renovations at the rest of the schools.

On the town side, the money will come from $46,700 already in the FY 2014 capital budget, $2,961 from the FY 2014 operating budget, an anticipated $10,900 from the FY 2015 capital budget, and $31,317 "to be determined."

For Schmidle, the consolidation was about getting everyone on the same page. 

"At the end of the day, buying the equipment is the easy part," she said. "It's getting everybody to agree ... to not be affronted by sharing. At the end of the day, the stars aligned. It just took time."


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