OETC’s Spotlight is a series of stories, interviews and Q&As highlighting news and ideas from across the Northwest EdTech community. Read more stories here.

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It’s as simple as moving a computer to the other side of a classroom, and as complicated as un-splitting the VPN channels. It’s thinking through what it means to have an in-classroom experience on a far-away screen. It’s preserving the very real benefits for students who use tech tools for language gaps, shyness or disabilities. It’s fear of the unknown, followed often by a strange relief at how smoothly everything goes.

Across Oregon and Washington, kids in medium and large districts are heading back to the classroom, and tech leadership is facing a new slate of challenges. Oregon prioritized vaccinating teachers, which means many, if not most, are moving on a similar timeline: Gov. Brown issued an executive order that elementary students should return to school by March 28, while grades 6-12 should reconvene no later than April 15. Lots of schools already have K-2 in classes.

North of the Columbia River, things are a bit more complicated: because educators only started receiving their first doses within the last month, there are some fraught, ongoing labor disputes that have frequently pushed back opening dates. Some districts are well into the reopening process, while others have yet to begin.

One Washington district experiencing a smooth reopening is Auburn, located just east of Federal Way. K-2 began their in-person classes on March 1, with grades 3-5 joining them on March 15.

Executive Director of Technology Jennifer Clouser said the work began long before they had any idea of the actual re-opening date.

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Back in the winter, they held a series of training sessions for their teachers on how to go live on YouTube; they also trained their paraeducators to be able to assess and troubleshoot Chromebooks, so every library has a small tech support center.

“We asked the teachers to review their classrooms and spaces, and give us a list by a specific date of the things we needed to address,” she said. “For example, moving the computer from one side of the room to the other.”

But there’s also concerns for the students who won’t be in the classroom: Jennifer reports that up to 50% of students may stay home, which means that teachers have to be able to address both audiences. Concurrent teaching will likely be used mostly in secondary, but they are still building in that capacity into elementary classrooms as well.

“We purchased voice amplification systems for targeted, needs-based usage and are testing additional tools, like for Securly Classroom, that allow for two-way chats between teachers and students who are home,” she said. “We expect to deploy more microphone and voice-enhancement type equipment that we have waiting in the wings.”

Broadcasting from the classroom, of course, raises multiple privacy concerns to be addressed.

“We did not deploy wide-sweeping webcams,” she said. “What we’re asking teachers is to use their classroom PC for things on the web, and using their Chromebook as a webcam, so they’re logged in twice to their own Meet.”

Above all, she said, she’s proud of the flexibility and resiliency of everyone in the district. “We’re pretty proud of all the training opportunities that we’d had for our paras; it makes everything more inclusive. We’ve really engaged non-traditional staff in the solution for our support model. Now, we have staff trained on how to do things they’ve never done before, and we’re really excited about these opportunities.”

At Seattle Public Schools to the north, questions remain about specific opening dates, but the entire tech department is hard at work.

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As they begin the return to schools, Director of Infrastructure Nancy Petersen is working to upgrade wireless networks speeds across the district’s 105 schools; they recently acquired 100GB from their ISP.

“Network-wise, we had last summer split our VPN tunnels for students, so any outside traffic did not come through the district,” Nancy said. “That will change when they come back in school, because that will be too big of a load on the network … so we’ll have to sort of un-split all that.”

Executive Director of Technology Carlos Del Valle then noted how, for lots of students, distance learning has given them the ability to connect with peers in ways they couldn’t in-person.

“COVID uncovered a lot of inequities in the system,” he said, “and some kids have said, ‘For you guys to give us the ability to chat within Teams has opened me up to other kids who are also shy, and now we can communicate, whereas when we were in the classroom, it’s too stressful.'”

He mentioned how technology can help make learning accessible for kids, and that it’s extremely important to bring those tools for remote learning — like closed-captioning and amplified audio — into the classroom.

They are also looking at how to continue providing expanded access for families who lacked it before the pandemic.

“The pandemic only exposed these inequalities, and the end of the pandemic is not the end of the need of these families to get connected,” Nancy said. “You can’t even apply to a job without being on the internet. I’m worried that not enough time is being spent on infrastructure, on making a permanent fixture rather than just a stop-gap.”

Over at neighboring district Tacoma, CIO Ed Grassia said that the name of the game for reopening has been flexibility.

“I can’t think of a single decision we came to where we didn’t change course two, three, 12 times,” he said, laughing.

Lots of steps have been the little things: setting up charging stations so that kids who arrive with a low-battery can charge it during lunch. Having loaner laptops on-hand in case one is forgotten or broken. They’re even discussing whether to let kids keep their laptops for four years.

Steve Menachemson, director of technology for Eugene School District, seconded the frequently-changing plans memo, and said that it has been tough at times to communicate with parents and guardians.

“As soon as you put something out there, people are either going to love it or hate it,” he said, adding that it feels impossible to please everyone.

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Another challenge: because supply chains are still so screwy, it can be incredibly difficult to make plans based on specific products or technologies.

“We bought document cameras and headsets, and that took us four months,” he said. “Four months from now is the end of June, so we have to be very strategic on what we’re putting in the classroom.”

“I’d love the opportunity of highlighting certain things in the room to an audience that can’t see the whiteboard,” he said. “Perhaps better sound, too, so people can hear what’s going on. Little speakers on a laptop are not conducive to filling a room with sound.”

He worries about how to give kids adequate social-emotional support, and notes that no one truly knows what impact the past year has had on them.

“How are you going to get a young student to sit in a seat and not move? Wherever you turn, there’s a problem,” he said. “It’s a bit like building an airplane in the air.”

But, he said, one silver lining is that district administration has truly seen the vital role that tech plays within the system.

“Historically, tech was just a shiny object, and now the realization is that we’re a critical piece,” he said. “Leadership has been critical for that change and decision making around it, and I’m very grateful to them.”

This is, indeed, what all districts can agree on: the genie of ubiquitous educational technology cannot be put back in the bottle, and the department is valued in a new way.

“We’ve already lost one staff member who was offered a full-time remote position who, because of having kids, it was just a better option for them,” Ed Grassia said. “So if we don’t become more flexible in our world, it’s possible we will lose IT staff to companies that do offer remote work.”

“From a technology standpoint, we are now at the point where it doesn’t matter whether kids are in class or at home or on vacation. They can access our tools, the LMS, their Office 365 accounts, their email — everything is accessible outside of our network via filtered device that we can offer remote support to,” he added. “We built it so that it doesn’t matter what the future looks like. The same way the work world has changed, the education world has changed.”

OETC’s Spotlight is a series of stories, interviews and Q&As highlighting news and ideas from across the Northwest EdTech community. Read more stories here.

lisa·èÂíÐãis proud to announce that Derrick Brown, Executive Director of Technology for North Clackamas School District, is joining our Board of Directors. Derrick replaces Tricia George, who held the same role at North Clackamas until her retirement in June 2020.

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Derrick Brown often wonders how his own experience of school would have differed if he’d had the tools he now puts in the hands of the 17,000 students of North Clackamas School District.

“I think if I had had a device that would have let me hijack my own learning, and go after the things that were important to me, I would have loved and adored schools,” he said.

After “checking the box” of college, Derrick went on to work in technology for corporate America. When the dot-com bust was followed shortly by 9/11, he found himself called to something larger.

“How was I impacting the world, how was I making a mark?,” he recalls asking himself. “So I switched into government, and that felt a little closer to making a difference.”

After a few years of working in infrastructure and security changes to airports, he once again found himself at a crossroads, feeling that he still hadn’t found his role.

“I was young, in my early 30s, and I still had a lot of road ahead,” he said. “I’m a man of faith, so I prayed, and I started thinking about what I could do. I had no answers, but I figured I needed a pause.”

So he did what anyone would do: sell all their belongings and depart the east coast for Central Oregon.

“My dog and I went from a house to a little 600 square foot apartment, but after a few months of hiking and cycling and fishing, the snow started falling,” he said.

It was then that education came knocking, and Derrick fell backwards into what would become his life’s work. A consulting firm reached out to him: Portland Public was consolidating some schools, and they needed a project manager with experience in the technical space. They also needed someone who could engage with the community, articulate and explain what was happening, and make a proactive case for the changes. He said yes, and a year later, found himself with a full-time job through the district.

Derrick Brown with his family, including wife Nancy — “an amazing school counselor, mom, friend and servant leader” — and sons Grant, 12, Kendrick, 10, and Cole, 8.

He also saw an opportunity.

“I’m a good communicator, and I immediately saw this niche in IT and education, where there was a gap between what schools wanted and needed, and what IT could provide,” he said. “We’re not just a utility, flipping things on behind the scene and making sure the switches in the closet are green. We have to show the value of what we’re doing.”

He asked his mentor, then-PPS CIO Nick Jwayad, how to get where he wanted to go.

“He said, ‘Go to business school and get your MBA. If you want to sit at the table, come at it from the business acumen perspective.’ And I said, ‘OK, fair enough.'”

“So I graduated, finished everything, and he said, ‘Now we need to get you a job.’ You would have thought I was a 3-year-old kid and he popped my balloon. He said, ‘You’re my peer now,’ and I was crushed, literally crushed. But he was right, I had outgrown my role, and sometimes you have to go to grow.”

So go he went. First it was off to Little Rock, Ark., following PPS’s deputy superintendent, Dr. Charles Hopson, who was going back home after more than 26 years in the northwest.

Little Rock, Derrick said, was such a challenge, and yet provided so many opportunities.

“That’s where I held my first chief position, and that’s where I began my first 1:1 rollout, with 18,000 students over 44 schools,” he said.

There was an enormous divide in access, he said, which led to him building fiber out to the district’s rural areas.

“I had to go into the designs and dust the cobwebs — literally — off building infrastructure,” he said. “I had to speak with Arkansas legislators and the Department of Education, because we were doing something no one in the state of Arkansas had ever done before, which is build our own network and our own infrastructure.”

But, he said, Little Rock didn’t feel like the right fit for him and his family — he and his wife, Nancy, a school counselor, have three sons, ranging in age from 8 to 12 — and so they returned to the northwest. Since then, he’s worked with Evergreen Public Schools, non-profit hospitals and even had a stint in Atlanta before landing at North Clackamas.

Although he has rarely experienced discrimination as a Black man in the industry, he said, it has nonetheless shaped his goals as an educator.

“My birth certificate says ‘Negro’ — I was born in 1969,” he said. “Even at Evergreen, I was the first male person of color in the cabinet. That’s a tough pill to swallow, that in this day and age there are still so many firsts to happen. I really don’t pay much attention to it, I don’t feel like I have to prove myself that way. What I do have to prove is my integrity, that I’m doing the best for those I serve.”

He credits North Clack superintendent Matt Utterback and the Board of Directors for engaging in serious dialogue about race and color.

“This is the first school board I’ve seen that walks the talk,” he said. “There’s Black and Brown boys and girls that need to hear my story, and I need to listen to them and be a sounding board for them. I think what we’re doing for kids of color is good for all kids.”

After his father passed in December, Derrick and his sons each chose one of his beloved hats.

It is, he said, that direct work with kids that truly keeps him going. Seeing the ‘a-ha’ moment, he said, is “immediate gratification. I compare it to cutting fresh grass. It looks different, and smells beautiful, and you can get it time and time again. No matter how bad a day you’ve had, you can go into a classroom and see why you’re doing it, see the impact of your work.”

When asked what he hopes his greatest accomplishment will be after, say, five years in the job, Derrick hesitated briefly.

“If you’d asked me ten months ago, I would have had an answer. But now, with COVID …” he trailed off, then re-started.

“Learning can happen anywhere, and in five years, we want to retain our students whether they’re at class or at home,” he said, adding that he wants learning to reach them, uninterrupted, wherever they are.

He envisions low absenteeism — “below 0.5%,” no snow days, no class missed in part because students are able to shape their own curriculum, and find what lights them up inside.

“I’d like to see students graduating earlier because they can work on their pace. I see students at a much earlier age getting their college credits and a significance in the number of students graduating with their associates’ degree. I see more students going into skilled work — welders, carpenters, apprenticeships in engineering or technology — where they just need a certificate to begin earning a living wage right out of high school.

Finally, I asked: as we all know, Tricia has a delightful secret: she and her husband hold a Guinness World Record in footbag (AKA hacky sack). What was one thing about him that surprises people?

He laughed, then held up his left arm to the screen, which is covered in intricate tattoos.

Something people might not see coming? The full-sleeve tattoo.

“The tattoos are like potato chips for me, he said, laughing, “and I’m not finished. My father passed away in December, and I’m working on a piece for him. But sometimes, when I roll up my sleeves, people will go, ‘WHOA! I didn’t think you were that type.'”

OETC’s Spotlight is a series of stories, interviews and Q&As highlighting news and ideas from across the Northwest EdTech community. Read more stories here.

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Spoiler alert: hybrid isn’t easy. It essentially doubles the effort both from the tech and teaching perspective, circumstances change quickly, and quarantine’s a … thing that is not easily navigated.

On the upside, there are those who have gone before, and can offer guidance and hope.

While both Oregon and Washington had, until very recently, been on statewide shutdown mandates, Idaho districts were left to make their own decisions. Most districts have had some in-class time (albeit with frequent shuttering and reopening) since the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year.

Boise School District did manage to get high schoolers in classrooms … for two weeks.

Having started with what CTO David Roberts described as a “soft opening” — bringing early elementary students back to school in September, then adding additional levels every two weeks — the district eventually found itself swamped, and had to return to remote learning from Thanksgiving through this Tuesday, Jan. 19.

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“At the high school level, there were anywhere from two to six classes of kids every day who had to walk to the cafeteria and wait until that period was over, because their teachers were quarantined and there were no substitutes,” he said.

During normal, non-pandemic times, they had a substitute fill rate of around 93%, which plunged to 60% at the height of quarantines.

“It wasn’t that we were seeing a huge increase in positivity rates for students,” he said. “The reason for the shutdown was operational — you can’t run a school if you’ve only got replacements for 60% of the teachers who are gone. Do the same thing with food service, bus drivers, every type of employee, and it was a business decision at that point. We couldn’t run the business of school.”

But he, along with Coeur d’Alene Director of Technology Seth Deniston, have also found great triumphs, and were willing to offer their best tips, highlight the biggest challenges and reflect on what they’ve learned — and what they wish they’d known.

Seth agreed that student quarantines are probably the most challenging aspect of hybrid learning. Coeur d’Alene schools opened a week later than usual with a blended model — half of students on Monday/Tuesday, everyone remote on Wednesdays, and then the other half Thursday/Friday. While they’ve kept the district as a whole open, they’ve had to close individual schools and go fully remote during outbreaks. They have, however, been able to bring all elementary school students together four days a week now.

“That’s the biggest challenge — what do you do with kids that are quarantining?” he said. “At the elementary level, you’ll have half the class out after a positive case because of the seating chart, and then that teacher is juggling both online and in-person students.”

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He, too, reported major staffing issues.

“My department is doing everything we can virtually, but custodians and bus drivers are the staffing groups most impacted. A given school might only have a couple custodians, and if both of them have to go out, there’s no one to clean the building — which is more critical than ever right now.”

While his department has stayed healthy, that doesn’t mean their job has been easy.

“You have the remote support for all of the students, and sometimes teachers, that are home, on top of already supporting learning in person,” he said. “So you are almost doubling your support load.”

“I think hybrid is maybe even more of a challenge than remote learning, because for everyone concerned, no two days are the same,” David said. “You’re always dealing with different issues. When you’re completely virtual, you know what you’re dealing with. If you’re in person, you’re dealing with things that are going on in the classroom. But when you’re doing both, and in most cases both at the same time … we have not always found a good way to match that up.”

Both men suggested playing a lot of the ‘What If?’ game ahead of time, trying to anticipate and plan for the unexpected.

“You have to make sure that your support system is ready to go, you’ve got to be sure that you’re ready for a student, a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, whomever, to call and get the help they need,” David said. “It ramps up even more when you go with the three-prong approach of hybrid, in-person and virtual all going at once.”

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He said that hardware, software and infrastructure will not always play nicely together, especially when they’re being deployed in multiple ways at once.

“I felt that we had gotten pretty good with our security, I thought we’d gotten pretty good at SSO, I thought we’d gotten pretty good with having our tools be easily accessible,” he said. “But with so many tools interacting, I don’t think our security was as good as it could be. Then, making sure all the tools were available to students in the right way wasn’t smooth. We thought we could automate everything the way we had before, but we had to go back to some manual procedures.”

Both said that synchronous learning remains a great white whale.

“lisa·èÂíÐã 15 years ago, Idaho tried having one classroom in each high school that would be live, and you could take that class from everywhere, and it just didn’t work,” David said.

“If you’re trying to do anything synchronously, that’s a much different conversation,” Seth added. “There’s so much equipment for that — when you think about the webcams and the mics and all the equipment that’s required to hold a class with children that are both in-person and online, that’s a lot. lisa·èÂíÐãand CARES Act funding has helped with some of that, but it’s definitely been a challenge.”

He said that the one exception is when lots of kids in a class are quarantined at the same time; some synchronous activities, he said, helps them stay connected to — and on the same level as — their peers.

He’s glad, he said, that the district has dedicated lots of in-person time to getting kids prepared for the possibility of those quarantines.

“Especially with our elementary students, we spent the first couple weeks in person helping them get that foundation. When we did go remote, those kids knew what to do. Whether they were elementary or high school students, they would know, ‘Here’s where we find stuff; here’s where our class meeting link will be.”

That is possible, he said, because this year his district was able to launch a 1:1 Chromebook deployment through Insight Financial Services and OETC. The kids take them back and forth to schools; if one is forgotten at home, there are extras in the classroom and library.

“Our elementary staff did come up with a great way to make sure they come back,” he said, adding those students are now in class Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. “The device is sent home fully charged, but no charger, so they need to bring the Chromebook back or it will probably die at home.”

Despite all the difficulties of hybrid, both David and Seth report insights and triumphs that would never have happened during a normal year, including increased flexibility, new partnerships with local vendors like ISPs, and a sense of immense pride in what they have accomplished.

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One success, David said, was having video broadcasting students livestream sports and activities to YouTube, which are better quality than they get with webcams, and preserves some of the special, joyful nature of extracurriculars.

“You’re dealing with the emotions of a senior in high school who thought they were going to play for a state championship this year, and that’s a huge issue,” he said.

Seth said the pandemic has made his district a much more flexible workplace.

“Some of my staff has really thrived working from home, and outside of COVID, I don’t think we would have allowed that to the extent we do now … so for select employees, I can see this becoming part of their day-to-day, where they work from home and maybe come in some days for meetings.”

Most of all, David said, this year has proven what his team, and educators everywhere, are really capable of.

“I’ve never been more proud to be an educator,” he said. “People have stepped up everywhere. Teachers care, admins care, they want to help their students to succeed, and they’re worried about the young people in our nation. It’s phenomenal what has happened in the most difficult scenario we could ever imagine.”

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