By Sam Elliott
Zionsville Community High School students will have a handful of new classes to choose from for the 2016-17 year as six additions were approved for the course catalog at the Dec. 14 Board of School Trustees meeting.
“The first two are sort of traditional extensions of our existing curriculum — that’s mass media and anthropology,” ZCHS assistant principal Greg McDaniel said.
Also included in the new offerings are AP Computer Science Principles, Introduction to Engineering Design, Principles of Engineering and a new internship-based course in the works called Career Information and Exploration.
“We don’t exactly know where that’s heading at this point, but we wanted to get something on the books just in case we opted to go in that direction,” McDaniel said.
In other new business, the board approved a migration plan to a new email system — one that will offer unlimited cloud storage for the district and its growing collection of emails and data.
“Basically we have run out of server storage for our emails, and we have been looking into some new options for what we can do there,” Dan Layton, chief technology officer, said. “Microsoft Office 365 is now available for free… for the cost of our migration, that’s basically what a new server would cost for us to put in, so over the next 10 years we could see a very significant savings.”
The district will hire outside help for the switch, with a one-time cost between $14,000 and $15,000 that will be covered by an Indiana Department of Education Connectivity Grant.
“That is about the exact cost for one server that we think would last about one and a half or two years,” Layton said. “This option gives us unlimited storage.”
In other business, the board:
• Appointed board recording secretary Jane Johnson to a full four-year term on the Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Library Board of Trustees, on which she had been serving in an interim role.
• Approved applying to the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance to take $800,000 from the district’s Rainy Day Fund to cover repairs to the heating and cooling systems at Zionsville West Middle School. The repair cost is estimated between $600,000 and $750,000.
