Amalgamation headaches at school board

The newly-formed Kawartha Pine Ridge school board is getting set to begin phase two of a project to unify the high-tech platforms of its 125 schools. When the Ontario Ministry of Education decreed that two of most geographically expansive school boards in Ontario merge together it meant massive streamlining on every level.

Restructuring of the Peterborough County Board of Education and the Northumberland-Clarington Board created one school board that would become known as the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School board, one of the largest in Ontario representing 125 schools and 45,000 pupils in a 7,000 square kilometer area. And for the information technology departments of the two boards, the question became how to make the differing IT platforms work in the new amalgamated system.

When the two organizations sat down to determine where the challenges existed in becoming one school board, chief information officer David Meldrum says it became evident almost immediately that the boards were at cross purposes when it came to technology.

"The two school boards were sitting on technology bases relatively different - one was focused on the Macintosh world while the other was on Windows," Meldrum explained. "We had 12,000 computers we had to address under different environments."

In fact, the system was comprised of several open VMS servers, hundreds of Novell NetWare servers, 600 Apple Macintosh workstations, dozens of Windows NT servers, one Sun Solaris server, two Digital Unix servers and 12,000 Windows 3.1-based PCs, among many other workstations. Meldrum said the school board chose Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG network management package because of its end-to-end IT management solution.

It is estimated the board will save $700,000 annually based on help desk improvements.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Jul 2000
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