Education Week - Managing the Digital District - October 2, 2013 - S18

CONTINUED FROM PAGE S17
“We think technology is at a similar tipping point,” Mr. Krueger
said. More and more districts, he said, are expanding their expectations
“of what technology can be.”
IN-HOUSE EXPERTISE
In some cases, tiny school systems end up seeking out tech-savvy
teachers to help them in formal or ad hoc capacities, said John
Hill, the executive director of the National Rural Education Association,
a West Lafayette, Ind.-based organization.
The trick is finding staff members who not only understand digital
tools, he said, but also how they should be used in classrooms.
“It’s rare to find it in one human being,” he said.
Mr. Hill, who worked for two decades as a superintendent
in a pair of rural Indiana districts, recalls that he was often
forced to think creatively when searching for tech talent. He
once hired an employee from a local Radio Shack part time to
help his district do technology fixes.
“It was better than nothing,” Mr. Hill said, “but sometimes when
you needed him, he was out working another job.”
Ripley Central School, in upstate New York, has taken a strategic
approach in securing outside help to meet technology needs.
The school, which is its own district, has seen its enrollment drop
from roughly 320 students to only 180. It faces many of the technology
hurdles familiar to districts everywhere, in preparing for
online assessments, trying to make wise equipment purchases,
and helping teachers sort through computer glitches.
Until this school year, Ripley Central’s technology duties were
overseen by a part-time tech coordinator; a specialist from the
state’s Erie 1 Board of Cooperative Educational Services, who provided
support two or three days a week; and the principal, Lauren
J. Ormsby, along with teachers and the school librarian.
Now, Ripley Central has decided to pay a neighboring district,
Chautauqua Lake, to accept middle and high school students—a
move designed to increase those students’ academic and extracurricular
opportunities, and potentially cut costs. The district’s
part-time tech coordinator was laid off.
Since then, Ms. Ormsby has taken on the role of the tech coordinator.
She receives help from the Western New York Regional
Information Center, a nonprofit public-service education organization,
on a managed-services contract. The regional center, which
is run by the state and serves 100 school systems, provides Ripley
Central with specialists, technicians, and access to a help desk by
phone, email, and online chat. The center offers on-the-spot help
and technology planning advice. Its staff meets regularly with Ms.
Ormsby and other district officials to talk about tech needs.
The district pays the regional center about $140,000 a year for
its work, though the school system will be reimbursed from the
L
By Michele
Molnar
S18
EDUCATION WEEK | October 2, 2013
Managing the Digital District >>www.edweek.org/go/digitaldistrict-report
Leadership Training Aims
To Advance K-12 CTOs
ike technology itself, the job description
of the district chief
technology officer is changing
rapidly—and often dramatically—as
public education transforms
around it, and through it.
That’s why keeping up with
the demands of the K-12 CTO’s
job can be difficult, because relatively
few of these professionals
are schooled in the perfect marriage of skills on the
instructional and technical sides to make the best decisions
for districts.
A school district’s top technology official may go by
many different titles, including chief information officer,
but chances are he or she must be prepared to help
educators implement new instructional technologies;
handle online assessments; manage student-achievement
data; and oversee cyber security—all while keeping
a system that powers everything from attendance
to budgeting to the grading system up and running.
“If you look generically at CIOs across all industry
sectors, in 1992 [PricewaterhouseCooper] said that 80
percent of the job of any CIO was technical. In schools,
that was ‘wires in the boxes,’ ” said Keith R. Krueger,
the CEO of the Consortium for School Networking,
or CoSN, which represents school technology leaders.
“Today, that’s about 20 percent of the job. The other
80 percent is providing leadership, vision, and an understanding
of the educational environment and the
actual technology.”
Many district leaders lack an understanding of how
a smart CIO or CTO can help transform their schools.
The issue may be evident in “help wanted” postings.
“Often, the school district is advertising for [CTO] positions
looking for skills that are not the core of what
they need,” Mr. Krueger said, “so they advertise for
technical skills, as opposed to leadership and understanding
how to apply the technology to educational
enterprises.”
Finding qualified people to do the expanded job of
a district CTO can be challenging—and, by industry
standards, less than lucrative. The consortium found
that salaries of K-12 CTOs lag behind those in the
business sector: Sixty-five percent reported an annual
salary below $100,000, while the average CTO salary
in private industry is more than $190,000, according
to the organization’s K-12 IT Leadership Survey
2013, which was distributed to more than 2,500 district
IT leaders, with 250 responding.
Tightening budgets have put an additional strain
on the role of chief technology officers.
“Some districts have chosen to eliminate or downgrade
the CTO position in California,” said Andrea F.
Bennett, the executive director of the California Educational
Technology Professionals Association, which
works to promote the integration of instructional
and administrative technology in school districts and
county offices of education.
Two or more years after the cutbacks, districts are
finding that was “a huge mistake,” she said.
“They wind up spending more on technology,” Ms.
Bennett said. “They don’t have a leader—someone
who understands the bigger picture for the entire
school, versus the needs of each classroom.”
A SHORTAGE LOOMING?
Mr. Krueger echoes those concerns.
“When superintendents wake up to what they really
need in a CTO, there will be a huge shortage” of
qualified personnel to take on the position, he predicted.
“Especially with the retirement of many CTOs,”
and the lack of succession planning for the position
in most districts, the shortage could become critical,
he said.
Three organizations have stepped up to meet this
talent gap by developing programs to train and certify
emerging and practicing chief technology officers
about how to meet the evolving educational technology
needs of school districts. While their focus is on
CTOs, each program provides a way to help superintendents
and other administrators learn more about
the best way to work with CTOs to improve schools.
The California association runs the CTO Mentor pro-
gram, which has been creating a community of support
through mentorship and collaboration for seven
years, pairing technology officers with mentors who
have been on the job in districts at least eight years.
The program also works to educate superintendents
and district leaders about the importance of creating
a cabinet-level CTO position.
When the current class finishes, the CTO Mentor
program will have trained 140 chief technologists in
three strands: education, technology, and leadership.
“We’re experiencing multiple paradigm shifts at the
same time in education,” said Julie Judd, the CTO of
California’s 17,400-student Ventura Unified district
and a CTO Mentor graduate. From the Common Core
State Standards to adaptive-testing technologies,
“
What I’d love
is to have someone
who could be a coach
and lead people when
they have an issue
[with technology in the
classroom]. It’s a
priority, and we’re
working toward it.”
JACKIE FORD
Superintendent
New Albany, Miss., Schools
more responsibility lands in the office of the chief
technologist than ever before, she said.
“Now technology is really important,” she said,
“because we work with systems and do the maintenance
of data for state reporting—and the local data
is what determines the local-control funding formula
in our state.”
For a former band director who came up through
the technology ranks, the mentor program was vitally
important, Ms. Judd said.
CERTIFIED ED-TECH LEADERS
Since 2011, a K-12 technologist in the United States
has also been able to take an exam to become a Certified
Education Technology Leader through CoSN.
Eighty technologists have received the CeTL designation,
which the organization said demonstrates
that they have mastered the “Framework of Essential
Skills of the K-12 CTO,” including the ability to define
the vision for and successfully build 21st-century
learning environments in a school district.
“I was looking for a system to show people that we’re
schools, not IT companies, so we need an understanding
of budgeting and strategic planning, setting policies,
a focus and understanding on the instructional
needs of students, the teaching needs of teachers, along
with our own professional development because we
still have to keep the network up,” said Jeremy Shorr,
the director of educational technology and curricular
innovation for the 7,700-student Mentor public schools
in Ohio.
“I found all that in their framework,” said Mr. Shorr,
the first technology officer in the state to earn the certification.

In North Carolina, the Certified Educational Chief
Technology Officer program is a course taught through
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s
school of government. The program is currently only
for North Carolina school CTOs.
Superintendents are expected to participate in a portion
of the 10-month program, which has been teaching
technologists for four years in a partnership with
the state and a nonprofit.
Neill A. Kimrey, the state’s instructional technology
director, said the program was instituted because “we
didn’t see a real consistency of making good K-12 decisions
based on best practices for acquisition and management
of educational technology.”
By requiring superintendents or assistant superintendents
to join some of the classes with the CTOs, the
program sees more impact, according to Mr. Kimrey.
Ultimately, however, about one-quarter to one-third of
top leaders do not attend.
“When I look at the districts where we’ve seen the
most change,” Mr. Kimrey said, “it’s almost always
where the superintendent participated.”n
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Education Week - Managing the Digital District - October 2, 2013

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