The Wenatchee School District is in the process of changing staff email addresses from the current domain @mail.wsd.wednet.edu to @wenatcheeschools.org.

The changes will allow many of the services that Google provides, including Google applications, notifications when a document is shared by a student or staff member, notification of comments in a document and its author, calendar notifications or changes through email, being able to use group emails within Google groups, and other tools Google offers.

When the email changes began, some staff members had problems with logging in to emails from home. “Some people gave up their passwords and the school district server got a lot of spam in it, so the change was also due to security reasons,” Ron Brown, Director of Instructional Technology and Assessments, said. “New passwords will include characters, numbers and letters so the system will be safer.”

About 100 total staff members have already experienced the change in their email address. The school district is hoping to get the switch done with all staff towards the end of the school year and over the summer. “We are still fine-tuning our instruction sheet, but one of the critical steps in those steps is retaining all inbox and sent mail archives,” Dave Yancey, WSD Director of Operational Technology, said.

The old email domain, @mail.wsd.wednet.edu, will be active and forwarding any email received to that address to the new address through the end of the year. This will give all staff time to notify those they communicate with that the address change is in effect.

“The last server was old and the state no longer supported it,” Brown said.

With this change in the email, all accounts will be in IMAP format, which is server stored. Emails will reside on the server no matter what interface is used to see it.

WSD technology staff is working on moving the school district server into a new Google website, where they will connect students and staff accounts together for better communication and a higher-quality server.

“This change will take from nine to 18 months and will improve the communication between staff members with the community, staff members with other staff members and staff members with students. It will also be faster and effective,” Brown said.

“We don’t make changes just to change, we do it to make it better,” Brown said.