K-12 districts benefit from MiCTA ISD membership

Michigan intermediate school districts with a membership in MiCTA can offer to their constituent/member K-12 school districts a blanket membership coverage that includes steep technology purchasing discounts. For a single $400.00 cost, all K-12 school districts within an ISD will be covered as MiCTA members, making them eligible for heavily-discounted pricing on telecommunications services, Internet services, emergency student notification systems, global positioning systems (GPS) and other technology.

Under the “umbrella” membership coverage, individual school districts would not have to pay the $100.00 membership fee to MiCTA if their ISD were a member. Those districts would be covered under the ISD’s membership.

“Actually, this isn’t a new category of membership,” says MiCTA President, John Sundstrom. “MiCTA has always offered this membership to ISD districts. But, we recently found that many constituent K-12 districts, and even the ISDs themselves were unaware as to how this ‘umbrella’ membership worked; we want to re-emphasize to both parties to enable them some of the deep savings on services.”

Some of the services and/or products that districts can receive include the absolute best pricing on telecommunications rates and bulk Internet bandwidth plans offered to MiCTA members by Sprint and Qwest; heavily-discount fleet cellular/wireless plans on Sprint’s nationwide network, and recently negotiated “best pricing” on student Emergency Notification Systems (ENS).

Says Sundstrom, “The ENS contract we’ve concluded this past month with an industry leader such as NTI will provide a quick and easy way for districts to notify students and school district parents of possible emergency incidents and events, such as school closings, school delays, and cancellations. Obviously, included in there, too, as a service is a wide area emergency system alert notification to students in the event of any unfortunate problems within a district. The ENS system can provide critical information, which when coupled with emergency preparedness by a school district, can minimize the impact of tragedy, says Sundstrom.

School Districts can contact their respective ISD and see if they have a MiCTA membership, entitling them to access these aggregated pricing services.