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Marshall County Board of Education Recognizes Student Achievements

The Marshall County Board of Education gave students who recently won and participated during academic competitions special certificates recognizing their efforts.

During Tuesday's regular meeting, the district's Golden Horseshoe winners John Hall, Allison McGraw, Sarah Naome and Jaylynn Robinson; the West Virginia History Bowl team winners McGraw, Ella Finley, Naome and Zoe Zervos; and members of the robotics team, Knox Wilson, Lilly Bergen and Sophie Cunningham, who competed during the Vex Robotics World Championship in Texas, all were recognized.

"Tonight is a special night. We get to recognize and honor and congratulate several of our students and the teachers who helped them achieve that success," said board President John Miller.

Superintendent Shelby Haines thanked the students for their hard work along with the teachers for helping and guiding them. She noted both the horseshoe exam and history bowl are prestigious events in West Virginia.

Meanwhile, the board approved spending $296,211.84 with Dell for a complete data center refresh at two schools. Carla Garrison, director of technology services for Marshall County Schools, said several weeks of design and configuration meetings were held with Dell, along with negotiations to get the best deal. The package will include the equipment and support for five years. The items include physical servers for John Marshall High School and Cameron High, backup appliance and software and storage arrays for both schools.

Garrison said they were able to negotiate $50,000 off the original price after asking for a trade in for existing equipment. Then they realized they may want to keep some of the old equipment for students to work on in class. Dell said the district could keep the equipment and still get the discount.

Dell also said it would give the district additional hard drive storage for free if it turned out they did not get enough, Garrison said.

In an unrelated purchase, the board approved spending $466,311 for new Motorola transportation radios via a state contract. Haines said the district's existing radios' ages ranged from 13 to 20 years old. The new radios will be connected to the West Virginia Statewide Interoperable Radio Network, which is the same system used by the county's emergency medical responders.

"We're going to use the same towers that the EMS uses and they're not going to charge us for that," she said. "They have multiple towers."

Haines noted if a bus is on a trip somewhere else in the state the radios can still be used because of its connection to the network.

"It's a great feature to be on the SIRN network," she said.