On Wednesday, January 27th, I spent a half day shadowing a school district’s director of technology. I arranged to shadow her from 8:30 – 12:30. She had suggested I come on a Wednesday morning, because those are the days she attends technology related meetings with other administrators in the district.
I arrived at her office at 8:30 in the morning. She went over her schedule for the day. At 9:00 a.m. she had a Support Services Directors’ meeting, at 10:00 an Educational Services meeting and at 11:00 she had a technology steering committee meeting.
After going over the days schedule she showed me her technology budget and talked with me about the budget cuts and they are effecting the technology department. I learned that her budget has been cut over 50% in the past two school years. She had to cut 20% last school year, then this year they cut the computer replacement budget almost entirely, leaving a minimal amount for emergency purposes and now she has to cut another 10%. Basically her 2008-2009 school year budget was $921,920 and for 2010-2011 it is $497,250, which is about a 54% cut. All departments and schools are experiencing cuts like this, as her school district is trying very hard to cut “the things of education, instead of the people”, which is a very noble task in my opinion.
The biggest cut to the technology budget was $270,000 which cuts replacing old computers with new ones on a rotation throughout buildings. $100,000 was left in this budget for emergency needs only. This has already impacted the tech director. Usually the procedure is that classroom teachers can request to get the old computers in their classrooms as student machines. The tech director already is receiving requests from teachers who would like additional student computers and she is turning them down in anticipation of the new budget.
After going over the schedule and discussing the budget, we headed to the 9:00 a.m. meeting, which was the Support Services Directors meeting. The technology office is housed off of the high school library. The meeting we were going to was at Central Office, but the high school is close, so we were able to walk. In attendance at the meeting where the following: the assistant superintendent of support services, the director of food services/warehouse, the director of business, the director of transportation, the director of child care (before/after school care), the director of maintenance and the director of technology. The meeting was lead by the assistant superintendent. He began by reminding everyone that items for the February board meeting agenda were due the following week. He then reviewed the status of the district budget. He encouraged everyone to look at the Governor’s State of the State. The Governor had stated he plans to fully fund the formula, but of course that is still subject to debate. Key things to watch are Parents as Teachers, transportation and career ladder. The Governor has asked for teacher union input. Ultimately the assist. superintendent stated what happens really boils down revenue. He reported that for the first time ever, the state will be with holding a small percentage of the funding formula. He gave the example if the payment to the district was to be $100,000, they will instead send $98,500.
After his budget update he reminded everyone of the classified advisory committee schedule. The classified advisory committee is for classified employees, which are paraprofessionals, the technology assistants, bs drivers, cafeteria workers, etc. These meetings take place so that classified employees have a voice. All of the directors at this meeting had employees who may want to attend those meetings.
He then asked for updates from each person. The tech director report that MoreNet’s funding was cut 35% and that these cuts will likely funnel down to districts, with fewer programs available. The director of business discussed purchasing a new projector for the Performing Arts Center and the assist. superintendent clarified with the tech director if they had officially determined what happened with the previous projector. The tech director said she believes it was damaged due to a lightning strike and if not, all signs still point to electrical damage of some sort. None of the other directors had anything to report. The meeting ended about 9:30 a.m. We were the only people in that group other than the assistant superintendent that needed to stay for the next meeting. The tech director asked if the assist. superintendent if he thought the other people for the 10:00 meeting could meet now. He said he was fine with it if they were available. The other people who were to be in attendance where the assistant superintendent of curriculum and the director of curriculum. It turned out that the curriculum person was in a meeting with the assistant superintendent of human resources and actually didn’t expect to be done by 10:00. They discussed rescheduling to 10:30, then just decided to cancel and meet up again at 11:00.
We walked back to the tech director’s office. I asked her questions about her job. Specifically I asked about Pentamation which is the student information/financial information system (two separate databases). I had heard a lot about Pentamation, but had never used it myself as the school librarian so she just clarified to me what it was. It is able to share data with the electronic gradebook and other systems such as the library catalog as well. She mentioned they had switched the Pentamation server from a unix to a sql server. At this point I shared with her that I feel like the database/networking stuff such as servers and switches and all the infrastructure is what I thought would keep me from applying for a job as a technology director. She explained that she has learned a lot on the job. She started as a computer lab para, moved up to a helpdesk person and then moved into the tech director position. She said the previous tech director had been willing to teach her many things. She also noted that the district was fortunate to have an excellent network and database administrators. They are very knowledgeable in their positions. She even noted here that with the budget crunch overtime had been cut in many departments but since “no two people can do with the network or the database administrators jobs, they still get it”. I told her I have even considered getting an associates degree in networking at the community college, just to have the background knowledge about what all goes on with networking. She explained that her department alone can’t do it all. They have occasionally contracted out big projects. For example she said they had a company come out and help last school year when the district switched to voice over IP phones.
Our conversation steered to legal aspects of her job, such as how much monitoring she has to do of students and staff on the internet. It seems like these things are always in the news lately of staff being inappropriate on computers. She said only 3 time has she had to be part of a forensic type interview, where a staff person’s computer was taken and turned over to police. She said most of the reports she sees from Light Speed (the filter system the district uses), are from high school students. She is able to tell which student, what time they searched it and what machine they were on when they did it. She stated with staff things, they are actually getting ready to send a daily email report to principals about flags that are coming through the filter with staff and students in their buildings. She said it is up to them as to what they do with the reports.
She said they are doing this new report because of something that happened to Springfield Public Schools, with an audit of their e-rate funding. Basically during their audit they were asked to show how they were compliant with CIPPA (the child internet protection act). They said they had filters on all their computers. Apparently that answer was not good enough and they need to have a policy in place about what they will do with violations of the filter. She said it is nice to learn from other districts, although it is not good for those district, but we can avoid those things if we learn from their experiences. She also explained to me all about what e-rate funding was as we walked back over to what she thought was going to be the 10:30 meeting. When we got there we learned that we were just going to meet at `11. We then sat in the board room and discussed the budget a little more. I asked what types of things she is looking at cutting. She said she is analyzing the online subscriptions. She is looking at how much each subscription is utilized. She said NetTrekker is one of the least used programs for the price. She also mentioned they were looking at possibly replacing United Streaming with Annenberg Media from MoreNet. I pointed out that had the potential to impact the school libraries, as we all use United Streaming to count for visuals and many of us hadn’t been purchasing many (if any) physical DVD’s or video tapes because of having United Streaming available. She said this was helpful information to her that she hadn’t though t of before. We then talked a bit about projectors and Smartboards being in classroom. She said every classroom should now have a projector, and we are getting closer to each having a Smartboard.
People began to arrive for the 11:00 meeting, which was the technology steering committee. In attendance at that meeting were the assistant superintendents of support services and curriculum, the tech director, the director of curriculum, the director of student affairs, the director of student support services , the two district technology facilitators and the database administrator. The first topic of conversation was about Pinnacle which is the analytics software provider/data warehousing support for the district. They are having trouble with Pinnacle doing what it should. I was a little unclear exactly what was going on with Pinnacle, since it was an ongoing issue that is still a topic of conversation. In a nutshell they are looking at what exactly they need to get data wise and whether or not Pinnacle is the best program for the needs. The group then discussed End of Course exams at the high school, which will be taken via the computers for the first time. The discussed how the schedule will look and if there is enough bandwidth to have everyone taking them at the same time (there is). There was also discussion about how students receiving special education services would be impacted by these tests. Finally the discussed test security, with a suggestion being made that students sit next to students who are taking a different test – ex: math, then English, math, then English. The next discussion was about the budget. The tech director discussed what she was considering cutting. Everyone shared ideas. She shared with the group what I had told her about United Streaming. The discussion then went to the Gradebook. They are working with the company to start using each buildings office scanner to scan bubble sheets for district common assessments. What buildings have been using where small scanners, but they are slowing dying and are do expensive to replace. The old scanners aren’t working properly, they aren’t scanning everything correctly, etc. The main issue with switching to the office scanners may be that they need to be cleaned more regularly because of dust particles collecting from more frequent use of the scanner. The final topic of discussion was transcripts. The database administrator has been working on the transcript system. Again, I think this was another ongoing discussion that I didn’t have the proper background knowledge on to understand fully. There was discussion about class rank and credits. Finally the mentioned some had attended a conference with a speaker called Ian Jukes. As the time ran out and others had to be at a 12:00 meeting, they said they would say more about this later. The tech director told me to take a look at www.commitedsardines.com , which would give me more information about Ian Jukes.
I thanked the tech director for giving me her time and we walked back towards the high school. I had to leave at that point to get back to my school in order to teach a lesson at 12:30.
In reflection, I see that the technology director has a very big job. I was happy to learn that with a strong network administrator, that maybe I really could be a successful director without knowing everything there is to know about networking and infrastructure. I also realized that I really do not know very much about high schools or how they function. Almost all of my education and training has been focused on elementary students. I think a good next step for me would be to become a technology facilitator or trainer and learn more about software. With budgets cuts across the state, now may not be the time, but I will watch in the future for openings in positions like those. I am glad I spent the time to shadow the technology director for a day.
