March 2008 — Features
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"We don't use the pay gap as an excuse to hire bad employees, but we want people who aren't necessarily focused on the highest possible paycheck," Moore says, noting that his department has found many of its newest workers by incentivizing current employees to recruit friends. "We can't often compete dollar for dollar with the private sector, so we have to improvise."
Chicago's Jackson thinks that having a reputation for hiring talented people presents its own challenges. When companies see a local school district as a legitimate recruitment threat, they look to cherry-pick members of the district's IT team as potential candidates to fill resource gaps.
In order for a K-12 IT department to support expanded business roles in a global knowledge economy, Jackson says the CIOs of today and tomorrow must create new ways of sourcing, developing, and keeping top talent. Her solution in Chicago has been teamwork and diversification; instead of pigeonholing employees in one area, everyone works on everything.
"We have moved beyond alignment to convergence," she says, "and all teams jointly recognize the potential of technology-enabled instructional, accountability, and business systems to improve teaching and student learning."
Staying Current
Considering Moore's Law, which posits that technology will outgrow itself every two years, it's no surprise that today's K-12 technologists stay up nights worrying about how to keep their infrastructures current.
Many districts do so reactively-they replace technology only when it breaks. Others, like Wake County, have embarked on proactive refresh cycles. White says that every computer in Wake County is replaced every five years. While White and her team don't centralize these purchases, the department has established minimum standards for all PCs across the district, and publishes sample purchase orders for individual schools and divisions to use as they explore this process on their own.
"Sharing our data, comparing results, asking and answering questions: These processes help clarify many things," White says, adding that data from organizations such as Gartner and the Consortium for School Networking help. "At the end of the day, we recognize that everyone is in this together."
At Forsyth, Mitchell employs two different strategies for keeping his technology up to date. The first is decidedly hightech. He and all of his three department heads spend at least a portion of every day doing research and development, testing new hardware and software platforms in a district facility called the Development and Research of Interactive and Virtual Experiences (DRIVE) Teaching and Learning Laboratory (see "DRIVE Time").
The second strategy is remarkably low-tech: Mitchell and his colleagues regularly visit district classrooms to ask students about the kinds of tools they're excited about, and the kinds of tools they're using at home. "Almost all students nowadays are very well plugged in and have some great ideas about the way technology could be used to make the classroom more engaging," he says.
"You can learn a lot from simply interacting with them. Sometimes the best way to plan for the future is to ask the future itself."
Matt Villano is a freelance writer based in Healdsburg, CA.
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