To the Senior Leadership Team at York Region District School Board and whom it may concern: 

We are writing to express our discontent with the memo from Thursday, May 25 re: limit of 15 GB for staff’s Google accounts and 5 GB for students’ Google accounts. We can confirm that these limits are insufficient for completing work in the twenty-first century, a time period known for digitization and technology. Technology permeates every aspect of our personal and professional lives. 

In 2017, the York Region District School Board (YRDSB) started pushing initiatives about modern learning. Technology is an integral component of education and the workforce. The Minister of Education Stephen Lecce has also been emphasizing the importance of using technology. Technology has helped staff prepare, deliver, and assess lessons and student work. Students are using many Google apps to complete their work in a creative manner that promotes higher order thinking. The Board has been described as “world-class” thanks to progressive policies and decisions made to provide the best resources to staff and students. The unlimited Google storage was a convenient, intuitive, and secure platform to store, manage, and share educational resources. 

As a result, the Board has purchased thousands of Chromebooks for students to use. Chromebooks use ChromeOS, which is the operating system that Google uses. All extensions, add-ons, email attachments, photos, videos, slides, PDFs, etc. reside under the one Google account of the user. It is safe to say that the allocation of 15 GB for staff is inadequate for a multitude of reasons. 

Through this petition, we are requesting that the Google Drive storage limit revert back to unlimited storage for multiple reasons: 

-It is impossible for teachers to use only 15 GB over 30 years of employment to save and create engaging lessons, make accommodations, parent contact logs, student work, manage Google Classrooms. It is even more impossible to expect students to use only 5 GB over 14 years of schooling. 
-Even before Covid, the Board has been heavily promoting the use of modern learning and digitization, leading to the use of Google. All staff and students were forced to use Google during the pandemic, therefore everyone in the Board is already accustomed to and adjusts their work to the Google ecosystem. Taking this away would be inequitable to staff and students, and it could jeopardize the Board’s status in the pedagogical world as a “top achiever”. 
The cost of cloud storage is very low considering the quality of services we receive, which will be explained further below. 

The storage limit reduction will jeopardize quality of education.

Teachers create and revise instructional content and student assessments to accommodate learning needs as part of the job. This means that we are constantly revising and creating versions of assignments and lessons. Accommodating learning needs is part of a teacher’s job and is mandated by the Education Act section 286 clause (a): “A board [...] shall assign the following duties [...] to bring about improvement in the quality of education by assisting teachers [...] in their practices”. With the limitation of 15 GB for life, teachers will need to delete valuable materials and risk not being able to accommodate learning needs. For example, photos/pictures/videos take up more space than text: a Grade 1 student will need to read a full page of text instead of a booklet with pictures because that is all the teacher can save in their Google Drive. This limitation severely decreases the quality of learning opportunities available for students. 

The allocation of 5 GB per child for 14 years of schooling is inequitable to their learning. Most students will need to create some type of media every year, whether it is a multimedia poster, slides presentation, sound clip, or video PSA. All of those file types take up more space than a Google Doc would. In fact, a 3-minute video would be approximately 1 GB. That is already 20% of the student’s quota for 14 years. How are students expected to reflect on their learning when they need to delete this file after submitting? And what about the teacher? The teacher receives 30 videos: that is already 20 GB, which surpasses the 15 GB limit for all staff. How are teachers expected to do their job? 

This reduction to 15 GB for staff and 5 GB for students for their duration in the Board will be detrimental to student learning and teacher professional development. Students will not be able to reflect on their learning because they will be forced to delete any files returned back to them. Teachers will not be able to receive all student submissions due to the limit of 15 GB. 

The Board refuses to spend 0.05% of their budget to support staff and students.

An email was sent to Heather Sears (Coordinating Superintendent of Education - Curriculum and Instructional Services and Continuing Education) and Paulla Bennett (Chief Technology Strategist), the senders of the memo. It is ironic that two people who we would expect to understand the significance of unlimited storage for the past 5 years would be the ones to send the decree to end the familiar environment most students grew up with. 

Paulla Bennett replied that it would cost “$800k annually” to continue current Google services. While that sounds like an astronomical amount without context, this number is actually extremely cheap for the services that we are using. 

$800k is 0.05% of the Board’s $1.5 billion budget. This means that the person in charge of curriculum and the person in charge of technology use decided that staff and students were not worth 0.05% of the budget. 

According to the YRDSB About Us page, we have “over 15 000” staff and 128070 students as of October 2022. This means there are a total of approximately 143 000 people using Google services in the Board. This is important information as it relates to Paulla Bennett’s statement that according to a scan of the Google environment, “less than 10% of staff and students exceed the storage limit”. She did not elaborate on who “staff” entails: consultants? Plant services? HR? Superintendents? Custodians? Health and Safety? “Staff” could mean anyone employed within the Board. 

In fact, her statement of saying that “less than 10% of staff and students” exceeding the limit is misleading. If we take only the staff number (since it is teachers who are creating content), which is 15 000, and divide it over the total of students and staff (143 000), staff comprises 10.4% of the total number of users. When we see this statement rephrased in this way, seeing “less than 10% of staff and students exceed the storage limit” could easily mean that over 90% of staff do exceed the limit. How is it equitable to remove a worker’s most important tool?

$800k divided by 143 000 is a cost of $5.59 per person per year for unlimited storage. This is an extremely low cost considering that Google’s own pricing chart states that for over a third of that cost, we would have a limit of 100 GB. $5.59 is less than a Starbucks coffee, and much less than a meal at McDonald’s. This means that the Board’s fiscal management is so inefficient that there isn’t even a leeway of 0.05% in the budget. 

To summarize, the Board is refusing to allocate 0.05% of its $1.5 billion budget to pay $5.59 per person for unlimited storage, which has been a revolutionary tool in pedagogy. Most students grew up with the Google ecosystem. To force staff and students who are still recuperating from the pandemic to adopt less intuitive systems is the biggest disservice to the community. 

In light of these concerns, we strongly urge you to revert the changes of the storage capacity on Google accounts. We are well into the digital era: 15 GB for life is not sufficient to provide diverse, quality education for our students. Increasing the capacity to a more reasonable capacity will allow teachers the freedom to continue creating rich instructional content without constraint. This will certainly uphold section 286 clause (a) of the Education Act, which guarantees that students are entitled to the best education that can be offered. A bigger capacity will foster a culture of innovation among staff and students. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Reinstating the current Google capacity limit, means that teachers will be more likely to incorporate technology effectively into their lessons to inspire students to reach their full potential. York Region District School Board has always been a leader in progressive pedagogy and tech integration in the classroom. Let’s help YRDSB continue to hold that leadership position in the province and beyond. 

Sincerely, 

Staff and Families of York Region District School Board

Letter size in Google Drive: 13 KB