No District Wide Time Standard

* * * UPDATE April 10, 2006 * * *

The School Board referred the original April 2nd letter below to the superintendent, Forest Yokum. He took action to correct the time problem system wide. He sent the following directive to the administration:

I have requested that all buildings and the bus garage set their clocks to the LACA time appearing on our computers district-wide. Forest

* * * * * * * * *

Letter to the Southwest Licking Local School District Board of Education concerning time standard problem:

April 2, 2006
Board Members,

It is very important that the Southwest Licking School District use a common time source. Example: US Naval Observatory master clock .

Most cell phones use GPS/Atomic Clock/satellite time standard. Your newer TV's, VCRs, wire telephones, network connected home PCs, and XM radios use it.
I would be surprised if all the PCs and servers attached to the LACA network did not have a common time standard.

Your bus schedules, class schedules, meetings, etc all depend on accurate standardized time to operate efficiently. Minutes count a lot. I have seen recently clocks off by more than 3 minutes building wide in the district. Students and parents, running on tight schedules, are surprised to be counted tardy to class because they are running on GPS time and the school clocks are 3 minutes fast. (Well, today they were 57 minutes slow due to EST-EDT change). People show up for 15 minute parent/teacher meetings 3 minutes late. The District office sees delays in what should be synchronized activities between buildings.

There are many solutions. I see them in about every organization I deal with daily.

One example of many: Adena School District Frankfort, Ohio and their vendor Primex Primex

Thanks for your time