By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
ssoldan@mihomepaper.com
Brandon Twp. — During the regular meeting on June 16, Thomas Bezak, director of technology for Brandon Schools, provided the board of education with an update on technology going into the 2025-2026 school year.
“We responded to over 5,000 requests for help or alerts this past school year,” said Bezak. “I think that’s a big feather in our cap for my two guys, we’re a team of three.”
In addition to 5,000 requests for help, the technology department repaired over 250 Chromebooks. They plan to begin replacing some Chromebooks next school year.
“We are approaching the end of support for our current fleet of Chromebooks in 2029, so we’ve started the process of getting those up to date with newer models,” he said. “This year we’re going to replace three grades, and keep replacing those until we’re all up to date. We did have a sampling of these go out last year, and they do seem to be holding up better than the older Generation Eights, so it’s looking good on that front.”
Bezak also said that he applied for a Community Oriented Policing Services School Violence Prevention Program grant (COPS SVPP) to hopefully cover some technology updates.
“It’s a school violence prevention program grant, it’s a competitive grant that I’m throwing in for,” he said. “If we get it, it will be $500,000 that we can use to bolster our security. I’m envisioning that we will be using that to upgrade our video recording servers and add badge access to the doors in the high school. If we win it, there’s a $125,000 district match. These would be really good improvements for our students and staff.”
Other grants have already been secured, including MiCloud, which will cover on-premise back-up for the next three years, as well as MAISA MiSecure, which will be giving additional security software for district servers.
“Funding is secured for three years, but it’s looking good to go past that,” he said. “So that’ll keep a decent amount of stuff off our budget.”