March 2008 — Features
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Point Man
White gathers with her inner circle once a week. During these meetings, she says it's critical for stakeholders to focus on the goal of doing what's best for the district, engage in a calm and open democratic process, painstakingly discuss each issue, and remember that nobody can be happy with every decision all of the time.
"In many cases, simply knowing we can discuss issues and involve everyone in the decision-making process is good enough," says White, who cites a new book by Keith Sawyer, Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (Perseus, 2007), as a source of inspiration in the area of building consensus. "With this approach, there's always room for improvement."
Balancing Budgets
Most K-12 schools implement a standard request-for-proposals process to find the best technology for the best price.
In some cases-particularly in districts that are struggling for funds-schools automatically go with the most affordable option. Other districts that have enough money from the tax base can choose the technology that works best, regardless of price. Such is the case for Mitchell at Forsyth.
Still, wealthier districts do put some deliberation into purchasing decisions. Mitchell applies what he calls the "replicability test," a rigorous total cost of ownership and cost-benefit evaluation. He declined to get into specific numbers and formulas, but the basic premise focuses on the relationships between cost, time, and functionality.
If the test determines that a technology is too expensive at a particular time, Mitchell will look for alternatives or wait for the price to drop, so the district never spends outside its means.
"This isn't rocket science, it's pragmatism," Mitchell says of the strategy that resulted in Forsyth waiting nearly five years for digital projectors, which are now in every district classroom. "We take pieces of our plan and spend the money to implement them only after technology becomes palatable and replicable."
In Chicago Public Schools, an urban district with 435,000 students at more than 600 campuses, technologists have taken a different approach. Sharnell Jackson, the district's chief e-learning officer, says that her teams have had to lobby for funding by demonstrating effectiveness with existing technology, thinking up innovative solutions, redefining job positions to maximize efficiency, and creating partnerships with local foundations.
Jackson has also engineered successful grant-writing campaigns. Chicago Public Schools has received grants from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Intel Foundation and Corporation, and the DAWN (Developing Awareness of World Need) Project Foundation. These grants have lead to the use of DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) assessments, videoconferencing with students overseas, and a new technology literacy curriculum.
"With declining budgets, the only way we can guarantee leading-edge technology is to…get creative with how we pay for it," she says. "These grants have become an invaluable part of the way we do our jobs."
