Education Week - Managing the Digital District - October 2, 2013 - S13

than set up a meeting or phone call, Mr. Baker said.
“The chain of command used to be more evident. Now it’s more
flattened,” he said. “The good part is that now people feel this
intimate relationship with the leadership, but the inverse is that
the superintendent’s job is now 24-7.”
Mr. Baker recommends that superintendents cultivate a
strong support staff around them to delegate the slew of daily
requests they receive and alleviate their workload. He also cautions
superintendents to develop a thick skin.
“It’s easy when you’re anonymous to sit back and throw rocks,
so how do you, as a leader, keep a good perspective and not get
rattled when somebody says something inappropriate?” Mr.
Baker asked.
One of the critical relationships superintendents should
focus on is between themselves and their technology directors,
said Scott McLeod, the founding director of the Center
for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education,
or CASTLE, which is based at the University of Kentucky.
Superintendents must make sure their technology directors are
people they can trust who will serve as facilitators of innovation,
rather than as gatekeepers, Mr. McLeod said. (See related story,
Page S14.)
“Superintendents often just listen to the tech coordinator. We
see that all the time,” he said. “You don’t want to defer to the tech
coordinator who is working against the learning mission and
may be overly zealous on filtering and blocking.”
‘THINKING IN NEW DIRECTIONS’
Mr. McLeod also points out that technology is making it easier
for superintendents to network with one another to share
ideas and best practices.
“Whenever they run into trouble or they have questions, they
have people they can tap into that they know have done it,” he
said. Building robust networks of thought leaders can be informative
and encourage new ways of thinking, Mr. McLeod said.
“Parts of those networks are set up so they jar [superintendents’]
thinking in new directions,” he added.
Perhaps one of the biggest technological challenges that face
superintendents is the impact of widespread budget cuts in
recent years, Mr. Baker of TICAL said.
“You’re left with a situation of having to make tough decisions
and be able to go out there and justify an expenditure
of technology that can’t show a direct correlation to a standardized-test
score,” he said. “It takes a lot of leadership to get
those kinds of expenditures through.”
But, he added, “in some ways, the budget issue has caused
us to look at some things that technology can do more efficiently.”

That has definitely been the case in the Vancouver school
district in Washington state, said Steven Webb, the superintendent
of the 22,000-student district.
“We’ve been able to be very thoughtful, deliberate, and stra-
tegic about seizing upon the context to do some strategic pruning,”
he said.
Although the district has faced more than $20 million in
budget reductions during his six-year tenure as superintendent,
he’s been able to weather the cuts without resorting to
layoffs, he said, partly by creating efficiencies in the district
that technology now makes possible.
For instance, the district has reworked the purchasing department
so that individual schools order supplies and have
them shipped directly to their sites, rather than purchases
being made at the district level, shipped to a central warehouse,
and then delivered to the various schools—steps that
added to the cost.
Ordering office supplies from individual school sites and getting
next-day delivery is an option facilitated by the Internet
that was not available when the district first set up its purchasing
and distribution channels.
The Vancouver system also revamped its nutrition-services
program with new software to track more accurately how
much food was needed and was being bought. The program
used to have to be supplemented by the district’s general fund,
said Mr. Webb, but now operates within its own budget.
The district has been able to invest those saved dollars, he
said: “We’ve been able to shift resources from operation support
to student learning supports and initiatives.”
The district is now rolling out a 1-to-1 computing program,
which will be put in place over the next five years, starting
with middle schools and scaling to grades 3-12. The district
will be distributing both laptops and iPads to students.
“This isn’t about the technology,” said Mr. Webb. “It’s not
about the devices. It’s fundamentally about preparing our
graduates with the adaptive skills they need to not only survive
but thrive in the 21st-century global interdependent
world and economy.” n
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Managing the Digital District >>ww w.edweek.org/go/digitaldistrict-report
S13
EDUCATION WEEK | October 2, 2013
ABOVE:
Steven Webb, the superintendent in Vancouver,
Wash., tours district schools on the opening day
of the school year. The district is rolling out
full-time kindergarten for every school and a
1-to-1 mobile-device initiative in five schools.
LEFT:
Teacher April Stenger helps kindergarten
student Valentino Diego Torres, 5, order lunch
using an interactive whiteboard at Minnehaha
Elementary School.
Great change
begins with
great
ideas.
Te education I experienced
at Peabody prepared me to
understand and confront the
challenges in the health care
industry. I now have the skills
and connections to deliver value
to my organization and the
patients I serve.
Ashley Mace Krueger, B.S.
human & organizational
development (health and
human services)
http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu http://www.edweek.org/go/digitaldistrict-report
Education Week - Managing the Digital District - October 2, 2013

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