January 10, 2022 at 11:30 AM - Information Services Committee Meeting

Discussion:  Call to order at 11:30 AM

Staff:  Kraig Lofquist, Deb Hericks, Priscilla Quintana, Andrew Easton

Discussion: 

The majority of the Apple iPads for exempt (home) schools were shipped and invoices are being processed for payment now. There will likely be cleanup purchases and returns for a time this month. Staff have been deeply involved in this process and have made it possible to meet these requests.  Reimbursement requests from schools are completed, and reconciliation is starting. Before reconciliation, we estimate $11,800,000 of GEER I funds will have been spent and $4,600,000 will remain.

Discussion: 

The main news regarding FRDLC is that with feedback from the Governor’s office, the plan will likely only have access to the remaining GEER I funds (roughly $4.5 million), and will need to focus on short-term items and those which can be contracted and paid by September, 2022. The FRDLC items such as the cyber security software and services, and other software update projects are items which may still be able to move forward. The Governor must allocate the funds during January, so this will become clearer during this month. Dorann Avey, Scott Isaacson, Tom Rolfes, Jen Utemark and Kristen Yates (NDE) are working through this process.

Discussion:  Dr. Deturk shared information on NITC federal funding.

Discussion:  Nearly all the ESU’s service inventory in SIMPL has been migrated to the SIMPL master service catalog. This catalog can be viewed on SIMPL at https://simpl.esucc.org/Service/MasterCatalog. This unified service catalog allows the data collected to more adequately reflect statewide ESU efforts to support Nebraska schools. Part of the migration process was to historically move already collected data to align to the master catalog.  This begins to allow some analysis of data over time. There is a small group of ESU staff from a variety of ESUs already exploring some of these data to highlight ESU’s efforts and effectiveness.  At Thursday’s PDO meeting some of those results will be presented.

Discussion: 

SRS
In December, the SRS team welcomed Rita McKinney to our staff as the new helpdesk specialist. With Rita and Trevor’s assistance, the helpdesk is caught up with tickets and normally all tickets have a response the same day or within 1 day of being submitted. The SRS team released an update in December which included a compliance update to the IFSP form and corrected a number of small issues with the operation of the system, from printing anomalies, data validation fixes and improvements to the student search/list portion of the software. The input from helpdesk tickets has been used to prioritize and inform these updates. The team is working toward a contract with a partner to help optimize the SRS database. The database improvements will make the system perform faster as well as providing a solid foundation for updating SRS, 504, and making future enhancements.

Technology Team
The technology team is continuing work on software improvements for the Project PARA and NVIS applications. Project PARA is planned for soft release (new registrations only) beginning in February, 2022 and NVIS by April 1, 2022.

Discussion:  The Digital Learning Coordinator gave his updates for this month.  PD For Me in December was pushed back to January.  The Special Project with the Social Studies Cadre are looking for their group of 30 teachers to help with the work this summer.  Future Ready Conference is beginning to be planned.  PD Stories continues to work on production and adding information on the website.  NVIS is on hold for now but we continue to add more VFT's.   TLT will build out resources for VFT providers and DL Courses.  Discussions on providing DL courses for schools.  

Discussion:  The Project Coordinator reviewed her report.  PD for Me has been added to the website and the link in the report.  There were 38 titles added to our SORA library.  The OER invoice will be coming soon.  She discussed the activity for the OER.  TLT will have a training session in February with some tours in Omaha and Katie Morrow, Apple will do some training on the second day.  

Discussion:  Hanover Research

Discussion:  Adjourned at 12:28 PM.