Kaneland school board, administrators at odds over district’s contract with copy machine provider

Kaneland School District 302 may go to bid for a new copy machine provider after the school board voted against renewing an $870,000 five-year contract with vendor Canon at Monday’s meeting.

Instead, the board voted to allow time to seek more information on Canon’s co-op purchasing partnership before taking final action.

However, some district administrators are pushing the board to keep Canon as the copy machine provider.

Associate Superintendent Julie-Ann Fuchs said choosing a new provider would require more training for district staff who already are undergoing training for the new Infinite Campus student management system.

“There’s a lot of training and learning that would have to go on,” she said. “We are in the middle of switching our student information system, which we did not have a choice in. It’s just not a good time to do something like this.”

Documents show Canon’s proposed bid would provide 33 machines across the district for a monthly payment of $14,620, making for a total payment of $877,200 over five years.

“We typically don’t bid our copiers,” Fuchs said. “It is legally allowable not to and I’ve cited the school code that allows that. I mentioned that we have invested a lot of time and energy into making the software that we use with the Canon machines work.”

Fuchs said the district has reduced the number of copies made monthly from about 1 million to 800,000 copies a month.

“[The tech department] has completely integrated our swipe cards, which we use to get in the buildings, with the copiers,” she said. “We worked very diligently to reduce the number of copies people make.”

“I don’t doubt that any of those statements are true, but $877,000 should be bid,” board member Ryan Kerry said. “We went through a similar conversation with the insurance broker. For years, we didn’t want to put the insurance package out to bid because we liked the broker. But we put it out to bid and it got $50,000 cheaper.”

Technology Director Tim Wolf said the copy machine provider went up for bid 10 years ago and Canon won that bid.

“Five years ago, when the one-year lease was up, Canon actually lowered their prices. We brought it to the board and signed another five-year lease. So we’ve been 10 years with Canon,” he said.

Wolf said the district holds quarterly meetings with Canon.

“I would hate to change systems. It’s working so smoothly,” he said.

The district pays Canon $16,370 monthly for 32 machines.

The contract with Canon ends June 1, documents showed.