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Improved District Portal Coming

for Students and Employees

The Division of Information Technology is excited to announce an improved
Enterprise Portal for both students and employees. The Portal will continue
to be the primary point-of-entry to access student and employee web-based
software applications, while providing the same access and experience even
when logging in from home. The new Portal will soon be accessible to all
District-run schools, students and employees and charter school employees.
Watch for upcoming updates!

The Portal offers four primary benefits to students and employees including:

• All web-based applications are behind a secure Portal; even when
connecting from home.
• Students and employees are automatically and securely logged into most
applications and systems without entering their username and password
multiple times.
• Students and employees do not need to remember (or bookmark)
addresses to many software applications or recall unique usernames and
passwords for multiple applications.
• It is cloud-based, which means it should remain available to students and
employees even during internal technical outages.

The Chrome browser ‘home-page’ of computers within the District network will
continue to default to the Portal login page. To access the Portal from home,
students and employees may go to the District Website and click “SIGN IN”
at the top right. To log into the Portal, students and employees must use their
District network username and password.

Internet Capacity Planning

Internet bandwidth capacity planning started at the end of the 2021
school year. COVID-19 changed the way we thought about capacity
planning, knowing that if we were to have remote-learning at any time, we
needed to be ready for suitable transmission rates. However, if students
were to go back to school, bandwidth needs would likely decrease with
the elimination of Google Meets and mass video requirements even
though we were now 1:1 with Chromebooks and devices. Since we were
already at a sustainable capacity of 60 Gbps that was put in place the
prior year and only using about half (remember, we double for DDOS
or emergency events), we decided to not make any changes to our
existing environment.

This proved to be the right plan of attack as students went back to on-prem
schooling in Fall 2021. Bandwidth requirements daily average fell to 15-
20 Gbps and we have more than adequate capacity to handle day-to-day
needs as well as withstand any emergency-type event.

Our current internet contract ends in 2022 and we are planning circuit
requirements based on E-Rate funding and scalability requirements
for the next 5 years. The next contract will be in place by the summer
of 2022.
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