Bourne Schools Moving Forward With ARPA-Funded IT Upgrades
Christopher Oliver, director of technology for Bourne Public Schools, is looking forward to forthcoming changes to the school district’s IT infrastructure after the district received an infusion of more than $100,000 in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding from Barnstable County.
Bourne Public Schools was awarded $107,115 for upgrades to its IT data servers and modernization of outdated infrastructure. The upgrades are part of the district’s three-year strategic technology plan, which Mr. Oliver began working on when he came to the district in December 2021.
“One of the things that came up in my review was the server infrastructure,” Mr. Oliver said. “The server infrastructure is essentially what makes up our data center. It’s our servers, it’s our storage devices, and all that.”
After review, Mr. Oliver said he was hoping to get started on upgrading the infrastructure systems sooner rather than later. He worked with Town Administrator Marlene V. McCollem and a team of town officials, including new information technology director Robert Przewozeny, to put together a scope of work, pursue funding and begin the process for executing for such upgrades.
Mr. Oliver explained that many big entities today, including BPS, use mostly virtualized servers. The few physical servers that BPS has are capable of running multiple virtual servers each. According to the district’s three-year strategic technology plan, upgrading the physical server infrastructure of the district’s data center at the middle school was of paramount concern.
“Essentially, we’re gonna be replacing all of our hardware for our server infrastructure at our data center,” Mr. Oliver said. “It’s certainly exciting. We’re able to bring our server infrastructure up to date. It’s between seven and 10 years old, so it’s certainly past its life expectancy.”
Server infrastructure upgrades at the data center is one of the seven action items for Fiscal Year 2023 included in the three-year plan, along with improvements to internet speed, reliability and security. An application for ARPA funding was submitted over the summer; funding allocations were announced at the end of September.
“I was pleasantly surprised that it moved right along over the several layers that it has to go through,” Mr. Oliver said of the ARPA funding. “One of the things that certainly helps make everything a lot easier is when the school department and the town side have a good relationship, and I certainly see that as the case…[Ms. McCollem] has been very supportive and Dr. Zhou has as well.”
Mr. Oliver said the district is still in the process of selecting a vendor, but he hopes to purchase the necessary server infrastructure over the next few weeks. Implementation could take longer due to ongoing supply chain issues, but he is hopeful that things will progress smoothly over the coming months.