Executive Director of Physical Properties Randy Trent poses inside a crowded server room at the Balas Administration Building. The makeshift server rooms soon could receive renovations thanks to the district's technology bond.
Chris Asadian | AnnArbor.com file photo
The renovations, if approved Wednesday by the Board of Education, will be to three makeshift and fragmented server rooms in the Ann Arbor Public Schools Central Office. The equipment and infrastructure housed in these rooms controls most of the technology operations district wide.
The three rooms will be redesigned and better engineered to create one distinct server room, one fiber closet and, if space allows, one small room for an office or conference room, according documents from the district.
There also will be significant heating and cooling and mechanical work done in the rooms, which currently have issues with equipment overheating.
Walking through these rooms right now, one would see tangles of wires and fans blowing on pieces of hardware to keep the district's technology operations up and running. The consolidation of the three rooms will allow for better access to the equipment and better climate control, documents say.
As the district faces an $8.67 million budget shortfall for the upcoming school year, community members and the Ann Arbor Administrators Association repeatedly have called for closing the Balas building and dispersing central office staff in schools throughout the district.
But AAPS Executive Director of Physical Properties Randy Trent said at the May 8 Board of Education meeting that district officials have worked hard over the years to centralize many of the servers that were scattered throughout AAPS to the main server room at Balas. He said the idea behind this was to be able to reduce the number of employees and employees compensation costs, which comes out of the general fund.
He said having the equipment all in one spot saves the district from needing more staff to run off to different buildings to fix problems that would arise.
"It would cost well over $1 million to rewire the district in a different way that doesn't all come back to Balas," Trent said.
Danielle Arndt covers K-12 education for AnnArbor.com. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleArndt or email her at daniellearndt@annarbor.com.