Jeffco Schools to spend $9 million on Phone System

GOLDEN, Colo. -- The state’s largest school district is replacing its phone system at a cost of $9 million despite a $40 million budget deficit that will result in school closures, teacher cuts, increased class sizes and fees for bus transportation, a CALL7 investigation found.

Channel 7 News

A $40,000,000 deficit and they decide this is a good years to spend $9,000,000 on a new phone system. Maybe it’s time to change the administration, from the board to Superintendent Cindy Stevenson.Stevenson’s quote

“We need a communication system,” Stevenson said. “I don't care whether we have no money or a lot of money. We will need a communications system that is safe, efficient and effective.”

My feeling is if you don't have the money you put it off for a year or two.

Easy solution, eliminate the 100 administrators, upper level management, etc. that each make over $100,000/year to cover costs. Thats $10,000,000 to cover $9,000,000 and the remainder can go towards the deficit.

Look deeper - the existing phone system is having problems - how loud would you all bitch if you called tried to call the school in an emergency and the phones were down? There's been multi-day outages in the district.

And, the vast majority of the money comes from a federal program that cannot be used for anything other than communications. The remainder has been planned in the budget and set aside for exactly this project.

This is not an example of misuse of funds - this is one shining example of the budget done correctly!

Nobody that matters wrote: Look deeper - the existing phone system is having problems - how loud would you all bitch if you called tried to call the school in an emergency and the phones were down? There's been multi-day outages in the district.

And, the vast majority of the money comes from a federal program that cannot be used for anything other than communications. The remainder has been planned in the budget and set aside for exactly this project.

This is not an example of misuse of funds - this is one shining example of the budget done correctly!

I beg to differ
from the article

the district has had sporadic outages once or twice a year –

The $9 million is coming out of general fund dollars and Stevenson said about $6 million of that would have to be spent for technology because it is federal money earmarked for equipment. But Stevenson conceded that money could go to replace computers in classrooms and other technology directly related to teaching students. About $3 million is borrowed directly from the general fund, which could be used for any other purpose.

And I beg to differ with the article based upon personal experience. The entire system may only go down once or twice a year, but I can tell you from personal experience that I have had to call my wife, who works in campus security for a Jeffco High School, on her cell phone more than once or twice in the past year or so because the school's phones were down and on more than one occasion that interruption has lasted for more than one day. My recollection is that it has happened at minimum 4x in the past year at this one school.

That's the problem with technology. Sometimes the old stuff is actually more reliable than the new stuff is. All the new phones require electricity in addition to the low voltage power of the phone line. The new phones are not the reliable mechanical devices that you and I grew up with, they are all digital now. While electronics are nice, the reality is that they are binary. They either work properly or they don't work at all. Losing one capacitor on the board can render the whole phone inoperative.

Did you see anywhere in the reporting on how much the district has spent over the last year, 2 years, or 5 years maintaining the existing system software by the district IT staff and replacing/repairing the aging hardware in the schools? Is it better to leave the Office 2010, Windows XP, Adobe Creative Suite 6 and other software on the existing student computers for another year or two or replace the phone system in a year or two? Has the traffic on the system increased to the point where it is nearly at capacity since it was purchased? Nothing works reliably when it is operating at or near its maximum capacity for an extended period of time, especially if it has been in use for 17 years already. Once components start to fail, the failure rate of other components continues to go up. You start out losing a few phones a year, then the rate increases to a dozen, then a couple dozen, then a few dozen and you finally get to a point where you have replaced half of them and the other half are all on the brink of failing. They could last another couple of years or another couple of days - and there isn't any way of predicting where in that range each remaining phone happens to be. They are digital, they work or they don't work - just like the electronic ignition in your car.

When you had a distributor with points, condenser, cap and rotor you could look at the components and judge their future reliability. Now that the ignition is all electronic there is no way to predict when it will fail or it's future reliability outside of its intended service life. If you don't want to get stuck on the side of the road, in the grocery store parking lot or walk out one morning to a car that won't start, you replace the component before you enter the window of the expected life of the component because once you enter that window all bets are off. It could work for another decade or fail the next day.

The entire digital phone system the district uses is within one year of that window. It's service life is between 18 and 21 years and it is 17 years old. It is already giving indications that the end of its absolute reliability has been reached. Unless you are willing to risk being without a phone system for weeks instead of hours or days you replace the system before it enters the window of its service life. Imagine having the system fail entirely and having to come up with an additional $9 million after you have already allocated the entire budget for that year, or spending an additional million immediately and have an inoperable system for a couple of weeks while it is being repaired, just to get you to the end of that year and having no choice regarding the timetable of replacing it regardless of what it means for the budget the next year. That is not responsible management of resources nor responsible budgeting practice.

The older the hardware is, the more expensive it becomes to replace the individual components. I have a high speed B&W machine that runs SCSI busses. They have been replaced by SATA busses in the newer generations of this machine and there is one, that's right one, person in the entire nation who rebuilds the hard drives that this machine uses. They have to be rebuilt because no one makes new ones anymore. FWIW, it too was manufactured in the early 1990's - about the same time as the school's phone system. At the time it was the best machine out there, and it's been obsolete now for about a decade. Oh sure, you can still get some second hand boards or hard drives from a few people who have bought failed machines to sell for parts, but the parts are getting harder to find - and you have no idea if that second hand part is going to last 3 years, 3 weeks or 3 hours after you purchase and install it. The reason I can afford to take the chance is that I can move work to another machine if this one goes down, something the district can't do with its phone system.

Seems to me there are a lot of ground the reporter didn't cover - I've just barely scratched the surface here and I'm far from being literate in the world of computers. From my perspective the reporter didn't start out seeking answers to questions, they started from the conclusion that the money should have been spent in a different manner and crafted their story so that the public would think so too.

With an annual budget of $969,000,000 per year, decreasing student enrollment why can't the overpaid 100 (making at least $100,000 per year) find the money to do the project? Because they don't want to. Jefferson county schools is the wasteful governance example here at home. If this project is so important, find about 9% cuts to do it.

My only comment is why do we need these fancy electronic phones with messaging at work? Use email! I hate phone messages at work.
I have one of the older ones at home too, that works with no electricity, only the phone line. $9million would buy alot of those.

Doesn't matter, nobody answers anyway!

PS, my husband has worked phone systems for many, many years. He KNOWS they can be updated at a fraction of that cost, without pitching everything and starting over.

I notice that your wife works for Jeffco schools. So, when it affects you, seems you find a way to justify spending the bucks.

Indeed she does 2w, but not buying the phones and raising her salary would benefit our household a lot more than a new phone system for the district would. Now, if my wife or I happened to be the person who received the bonus from the sale I could see you leveling that charge, but outside of that it's a baseless accusation. My wife's job with the district has nothing to do with phones, other than she uses them to make and receive phone calls while at work. I'm sure she would actually prefer in many instances not to have to deal with the parents of students who complain about security harassing their child about wearing their hood up, skateboarding down the halls, or wandering the halls instead of going to class with the convenient excuse that the phone wasn't working and she didn't get the nasty message that they left for her.

Yes, you can upgrade the central computer and the various on site ones with new hardware and software and keep the aging individual phones in place and continue to replace them with new ones as they fail with ever greater frequency until all of the old ones are gone. What you have then is a system that will actually cost you more when all is said and done than replacing the phones along with the new computers and software. Each phone will be more expensive to purchase when they are purchased in this manner. You will actually end up spending more money replacing 20% of the phones a year over a 5 year period than you will replacing them all at once. It will cost you not only more for the phones themselves, but also in labor sending out the IT person to replace one or two phones a day at 3 different schools spread throughout the district. More labor, more wear and tear on the district vehicle, more fuel - overall much less efficient and a far less prudent use of the taxpayer funds. Not to mention you've created a perpetual circle in the process since different points of the system will now have a wide variance in the future with regards to maintenance needs.

There is a reason that bus companies don't drop a new engine in a 15 year old bus. Sure, it costs less than replacing the entire bus would, but it's a poor financial decision. Your power plant is new, but you still have the old transmission, old shocks, the worn brakes, the aging electrical, the rusting frame, the old air conditioning and all of the other worn parts to worry about. You are not going to get the same reliability as you would buying a new bus. A fair amount of the money you didn't spend buying the new bus is going to be spent addressing the maintenance needs that still exist in the old one. You might get another few years out of it, but you are not going to get the same number of years out of it that you are going to get out of the new bus. You haven't eliminated the need for the new bus, you are still going to have to buy it, so what you've accomplished is simply increasing your overall expenditures. A new bus is going to have a warranty that the old one doesn't, it is going to require less maintenance and it is going to give you greater reliability - all of which is going to lower the cost of operating it compared to the old one with a new engine.

I think this is a better expenditure of money than keeping an underutilized school open because some people have an emotional attachment to the current school their child is attending or it is more convenient for them to take their child there than it will be to take them to a different school. I think it is a more prudent expenditure than upgrading the software on all the computers to the latest, greatest version of Microsoft Office. I think it is a better expenditure of money than replacing desktops with laptops simply because laptops are more "green". I think it's a better expenditure of money than upgrading the XP OS to Windows 7 OS on all the computers in the district. There are quite a number of areas where the district wastes money, or spends a lot more than it needs to. I just don't happen to agree that this is one of them.