SALISBURY — The Rowan-Salisbury School Board approved a Title 1 plan for the district and tabled a discussion to upgrade its mobile device management platform Monday.

Jerri Hunt, the district’s federal programs executive director, explained that the Title 1 plan is a program geared towards economically disadvantaged students. 

“It helps with our school district to level the academic playing field to offer additional support with supplemental funding from the federal government,” Hunt said. 

According to Hunt, the district accomplishes that in various ways. 

“Our district focuses on reading and math,” Hunt said. “We provide tutoring with some schools … supplemental materials, instructional materials, after school programs are various ways that schools can drive their academic gaps.”

A key component of using federal funding involves distinguishing between supplementing and supplanting local funding sources.  

“Basically, with the federal government, we apply for these grants that cannot take the place of local or state funds,” Hunt said. “Anything that has been designated with state or local funds we cannot then shift to federal funding.” 

With that funding, Hunt said, RSS “provides salaries for reading coaches at all the elementary schools as well as support for our CSI and TSI schools.” 

Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) schools are in the bottom 5 percent of Title I schools for all students or have a graduation rate of 67 percent or lower.

Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) schools are consistently underperforming for any group of students, as defined by the state.

“We also provide five positions for social workers at our high-needs schools,” Hunt said. “We have other designations that are federally mandated such as homeless, foster care; we also have five title 1 pre-K programs that we support as well as neglected and delinquent with the (Children’s) Nazareth Home.”

The motion was approved unanimously.

The board also voted on upgrading the district’s Mobile Device Management system.

RSS Accountability Director Damien Akelman explained that it was set aside as part of the school system’s lease with Apple. 

“Our MDM allows us to track and update all of the devices across the district,” Akelman said. “The update will allow us to do a lot more things with (the devices). 

When the district negotiated the lease with Apple, Moysle was in a beta platform, meaning they were still rolling out new features.

“We purchased half of the program, which was $5.50 per enrolled device yearly,” Akelman said. “They introduced the other half over the summer, and we were one of the first districts to see what that pricing was going to be.”

The new price is $9 per device or a $3.50 upgrade. The school system has approximately 25,000 devices. 

“The first year is free because of the way we negotiated our lease,” Akelman said. 

What does Moysle entail?

“The upgrade will allow us to have enhanced device management so we can track things more granularly,” Akelman said. “(With) Content filtering, we can see what is going on the iPad.”

Endpoint security allows the district to lock down the iPads if necessary. 

Akelman said the platform would allow for more enhanced remote troubleshooting. The upgrade cost would be spread across the seven lease payments for the devices. That first payment is due on March 1. 

Kevin Jones asked Akelman if this would disrupt students.

“It’s really more on the back end (for us),” Akelman said. “It will be easier to educate our kids if there is a technology issue.”

The next RSS Board business meeting will be held at 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 25 at the Wallace Educational Forum at 500 N. Main St. in Salisbury.