You may read this article as a presentation of an employment concept or as an endorsement of a person; either way, you are right.
Which is more valuable when you are short on each – human talent or tangible, highly desired, working things? Which is the better investment when dollars are scarce? How do you tell people who want things now, “Be patient, please. We’re working on it.” We picked talent and never asked the question again.
Technology in a small school district always has been a conflict of competing interests. Small enrollments produce small revenue streams that must nourish everything the small school strives to do. Small schools wanting to provide contemporary instructional and learning technologies face the wall of reality; technology is expensive. For these reasons, many small schools in the 90s and first decade of 2000 lingered in the backwater of educational technology.
The Gibraltar Schools (Fish Creek, WI) were in that eddy in the late 90s. Our K-12 enrollment of 600 children enjoyed many advantages; first and foremost was a very favorable teacher-student ratio resulting in small class sizes. In ’97 our students had access to two, small iMac computer labs and most teachers had older Apple desktop models in their classrooms. Gibraltar is on the northern Door County peninsula where early Internet lines hung from highway telephone poles in a single loop circumnavigating the peninsula. It was a fragile, low capacity structure that fed our small, low capacity technology and we supported our technology with a part-time IT employee.
As with many systems in small schools, when one component of the system is disrupted, the entire system falters. In 2000 our part-time IT man left us, making the right decision to pursue a better financial future for his family. Without the Man, our two computer labs, our array of desktops and low-incidence applications were in jeopardy of tanking because we had lost our support system.
The ensuing search for a new IT person resulted in a series of similar conversations with similar candidates. There was one question, however, that drastically changed the course of Gibraltar’s technology. When asked, “Specifically and conceptually, what qualities do you bring to the life of Gibraltar’s educational technology?”, most candidates spoke well and at length about personal specifics and whiffed on the conceptual. However, one candidate said, “My resume and recommendations explain that I am a good ‘screw driver’. I can build and maintain computer operations.” Then, he lit us up talking about the “potentials” and “possibles” of how technology could be used by students and teachers and school leadership; brainstorming ideas, one after another. This was the talent we were looking for in spades. We knew immediately that his talent for seeing both our technology needs and our technology potentiality made him THE man.
We bought him. We bought his talent of insight and foresight. We bought the vitality of a new administrator/IT partnership committed to “what comes next.” From that partnership, the Gibraltar Schools blossomed with a rebuilt internal backbone of linked servers and classrooms where every user had access to essential applications. We watched the stringing of higher speed copper wire later replaced with fiber. We listened to his networking with Verizon as they replaced copper on the phone poles with fiber and then, magically sawed through the bedrock of our campus to attach our school to their fiber. He made what everyone said could not happen happen.
We chased a small, annually renewable federal grant and installed a “one laptop per student” program for all high school students; theirs for school, home and for keeps. In addition to a small cadre of permanent laptops in each K-8 classroom, we installed a “laptop per student in school” program with mobile labs that gave every teacher access to classroom laptops whenever their instructional plan required each student to have a hands-on laptop. Every classroom wore an interactive white board. Our new systems integrated real time instructional management of student data recording, reporting and analysis (attendance, grading, and testing with parent notification, including homework and assignment posting). For a small, rural school district, we became rich in instructional and learning applications.
The uniqueness of our administrative/IT partnership was its “skunk works.” Talent thrives when it has the opportunity to experiment with the “what ifs.” Our talent developed a “skunk works” that field tested many laptops in preparation for our OLPS program, built working mini-stations driven by cell phones, and, before school security was a hot issue, installed an in-school and campus camera system on a “dime.”
For more than a decade, THE man fretted the constant need to add more servers, replace old servers, and commit too many dollars and too much time to the management of our in-school server system. It was an “anchor” of heavy weight and he wondered, “why?” Our partnership conversations became laced with his discussion of “off-site servers”, “server farms” and “renting space where we have instant and constant access to our programs from afar.” All of this was conceptual until the day he began talking about Amazon. Recently, the Gibraltar Schools became the first public school district in the nation to move its educational technology systems to Amazon Web Services and operate within the “cloud.” Causing this concept to become reality will save the schools 25% of what they would otherwise spend on owning and maintaining in-house server systems over the next five years. Migrating school-wide applications to AWS means that district human resources needed to monitor and sustain these workloads can be directed to the “next” concepts that will advance the Gibraltar Schools into an even more conceptually sophisticated future.
Human talent is the essential element in causing organizations like schools to move from their status quo into a future of possibilities. While the conceptual development of new ideas may come easier to the talented, it is their capacity to create networks with others that creates the push-pull of organizational advancement. The Gibraltar Schools would have remained in the herd of tech “wannabes” if it were not for THE man we hired. The answer to the earlier question clearly is “talent.”
(Steve Minten is the Gibraltar Schools’ “talent.” Mr. Minten has been the district’s Instructional Technology Director for 15 years. He is the only certified AWS Solutions Architect in Wisconsin. Mr. Minten can be reached at sminten@gibraltar.k12.wi.us)