Hello, You’re listening to the K-12 tech podcast, bringing you insights into the world of education technology. Stay tuned as we discuss the past, the present, and most importantly, the future of technology in our schools.
Pete, just thanks for being on the K-12 tech podcast for Origins Episode number three. We obviously spent most of the day together, and you made the drive up here. Yeah. Thanks for being on the pod.
Really happy to be here.
Yeah. So the focus of this is, is origins, and it mostly focuses on someone’s origin story and, you know, getting to tons of different tech directors. Very rarely is it someone who started out in technology and then ended up as a tech director. There’s a lot of different journeys that they’ve taken to get where they are, and I think more to take down that stigma of, you know, I didn’t start out in technology. My degree is in technology, so I can’t ever be a tech director or inside of that space. And I think having these stories of these people have very interesting beginnings and where they’re ending and continuing on their career. So I’m excited to hear your story.
Yeah, it should be fun.
All right. Let’s start from the beginning. Kind of, you know, your childhood interests and then walk through high school and into college what you wanted to do.
All right, well, I grew up in Chicago, downtown. Both of my parents were immigrants. So my first language was German, and we lived in Germantown and in Chicago. And it’s kind of funny. One day I went home, I told my parents, I said, Hey, there’s a kid that moved in down the street. And when he was talking, I didn’t understand what he was saying. Well, he was speaking English.
How how old were you?
Oh, I was probably two or three. I was probably three or four years old. Maybe. I don’t really know how old I was exactly. But, you know, at that point, I wasn’t speaking English yet. So my parents put me in a program that Chicago Public Schools had that was for students that were, you know, English as a second language. I guess we had no idea sell or, you know, whatever. But. And so that was, you know, a great I grew up with a great family, great upbringing. And I think we would go visit my relatives frequently that lived in Chicagoland. And so every weekend was spent with cousins hanging out. And then we would frequently go back to Germany, visit my grandmother grandfather’s.
And that was just it was a great time of growing up for me. I have a brother and a sister who I’m still very close to and we all went to Northern Illinois University. I was the oldest. I was the first one there. I mean, all of us went to college because my parents and my dad never graduated from high school. My mom didn’t graduate until she took like a correspondence kind, of course, because they were twins during World War Two. So, you know, they didn’t get a chance to go to high school. So they highly valued education. And so that was something they always told us was when you go to college, you know, you know, this is something you might be able to learn or whatever.
So this just kind of like almost assumed. I never thought of not going to college except for I worked for my uncle in a Tool and die shop, you know, when I was in college and before a little bit and, you know, they were like, oh, you should quit college and work with us, you know, or whatever. And by the end of the summer, I was always ready to go back to school. But what I was studying really was biology. I was really interested in sports medicine, and that was because I was an athletic trainer in high school. I was a student trainer, I was also a swimmer, and I was just looking to try to stay involved in something other than German club. And so I got really into sports, really kind of almost as an observer participant and helping as a student trainer.
And so I went to Northern because Northern offered me the best opportunity to get my education there and also be a part of their their athletic department. And so it was a different direction than education as a career.
So you’re in college focusing on the physical training side. What changed with that? Obviously, you got into education and what were like the next steps in that changing as weird?
You know, it’s always interesting to me too. So I love the fact that you’re doing an Origins series, how people got to where they are, because there’s always weird stories there, right? So I was a swimmer in high school and I was a biology major in high school in college with a goal of going to school pre peaty was what my major was slash biology or med school or something like that, right? Something in the medical field. I didn’t really want to be a doctor though, because that seemed to be too much. I wanted to help people and so we didn’t really have a lot of money. So spring break was always spent back home. So, you know, I’d visit with my high school teachers and I was visiting with my high school swim coach who was also biology teacher.
And so Ed said, Hey, it’s coming up on lunch, so let’s have lunch together. But after lunch I got to go run off a bunch of papers. Could you run up to my room and get class started as like, Oh, what does that mean? He’s like, Well, I’ve got everything on the desk for you. He’s like, You just need to. There’s a list. Take attendance. Just tell him you’re a sub, and then I’ll be back in there in a couple of minutes and I just need to write these papers. You know, this is when making copies was kind of a bigger deal, I guess. But so I get started and I look and in Illinois, I sex ed is part of biology class.
Oh my gosh.
And I was reviewing with them the sex ed units, and he never came back.
Did he do that on purpose?
He totally did it on purpose. Oh, he was in the hallway. He said I was laughing so hard. I said, You were in the hallway the whole time. What the heck? Come on. He’s like, Oh, it was funny. But you know what? You did a good job. You should think about being a teacher. And that was the first time I thought about doing something other than going into sports, medicine and a career in medicine. So very weird kind of entry into that. But, you know, he gave me the confidence by doing that little tricky pulled in by saying you did a good job.
And so that made me think twice. I thought, well, maybe I still like sports medicine, but maybe I can get my, you know, certification and still be a teacher because that was kind of one of the routes. You could go work in the clinic, you could go work in a school in. My goal was work in a clinic and then be a physician’s assistant and or a P.T. or something like that. But that all sort of shifted then that year for me to start thinking about education.
That’s hilarious. Yeah. So what, you’re in college were you in that happened?
I was just finishing up my sophomore year.
Okay. So by midway through.
Yeah.
So, so after that, you obviously became a teacher. How to get your teaching license. What led into that after that? So walk me through the next couple of years.
Yeah. So, you know, I was, I took one class that was kind of like a technology class that they offered at Northern Illinois. And that class was really all about kind of the type of technology that might be in the library. Yeah. Which is, you know, super basic, not really computers or anything like that. Very basic stuff. That was the only class that was offered. So, you know, I got my degree in biology and my certification in athletic training. I had to pass a test and all that kind of stuff, a national exam. I did that. So I was certified as an athletic trainer. And then I got a long story short, I got a job opportunity in Indiana.
So I thought, okay, Indianapolis, not too far, so I’ll go ahead. I’ll be a teacher. But prior to that, the original plan was that I was going to work overseas as a in a clinic, and that that would take about three years for me to be able to do that. I’d been talking to a missions organization actually that was giving me the opportunity. So I went to teach thinking, Well, you know, after a year it’ll just be kind of the same thing every time, and that’s going to get boring. So that’ll be what I do in three years, is I’ll go work in this clinic and you know, I can speak German. So there’s some people there that were going to have me there, and that all kind of fell through. And so I thought, well, now what I, what I want to do. Well, I think I still want to be in sports medicine. I do like teaching. It turns out that it’s a little harder than I thought it was going to be and that you can’t just do the same thing over and over again. You have to customize really every class for the students that are in that class.
So there is some realization that took place for me there. And I started using technology initially because what my peers were doing was they were using the same tests every time and just running them off. And I thought, Well, I want to change the test from year to year. I hate typing, so I’m going to use a word processing tool to do that for me. So I really getting into technology because I was just wanting to use a word processor instead of running the same exams all the time and being able to do some customization off of work I had previously done, you know? So this tells you how old I am that that was that was a thing. And before you knew it, you know, I was the one that was using technology more than anyone in the school I was using, you know, at that time it was an Apple two lab.
So that’s how old was, and no one was using it. And so the media specialist loved me because I would schedule simulations in there and things like that that we could do with some software that we had on hand. And so before you knew it, I was the technology expert at this high school in Indianapolis, and they said, Hey, will you be the computer coordinator? And I said, Well, what does that mean? Well, the math department chairs the computer coder and now but he doesn’t want to do it. I said, Well, what does he do? Oh, you just have to Your job is to take the serial numbers off of all the keyboards, mouse mice, and computers and just kind of keep track of that. I said, that’s all I have to do for whatever it was, $1,000 stipend, you know, I was like, okay, I’ll do that for $1,000. I’m a I’m a husband, I’m a dad. I could use a couple extra bucks.
Yeah.
And that’s what got me into, you know, I was using it in my classroom heavily, more and more. But that’s what got me into the technology arena.
Do you remember a time early on in your career where you were using technology and you’re like, This is going to change the world? Like like this is going to just because I remember a few of those instances, like more recently using Chat, GPT would be one of those for me. I’m like, Whoa. I think first time I used Microsoft Excel, I was like, what?
First time I used a Google document me and like three other classmates were working out at the same time. Do you have some memories of like, this is more things of like it just wasn’t well known what its capabilities were?
Yeah, I have all these experiences that you had were all, I think, pretty instrumental. Those are all big shifts, right? I think and in ways that were disruptive, probably the very first one for me was that a word processor was better than a typewriter. That was probably the first one. And I think I was I forget what product I was using, but that was probably the first one. The next one, probably within a year or two was I was using I had a laserdisc that had movies in pictures that I was using with my old Mac classic.
And I learned I could connect those two together to make what they call a level three laserdisc system. In other words, I could write hyper stat cards on the Mac that would then reference parts of the laserdisc and pull them up on the screen. So basically I, I basically wrote a whole bunch of high stack to automate this laserdisc player two videos and stills, and then I would use it in my classroom to do kind of like an opportunity to do personalized instruction or just to kind of work me through a sequence of things I wanted to teach, you know, in a progression and then showing the students on the screen what was possible. And no one was really doing that because you had to go through a scan converter and it was a real pain in the butt. But I put in a lot of energy to do that because I saw the value of it because I thought this could really make a big difference. If a student is visual, like I am talking about something like my ptosis, you know, a process of cell division is pretty boring when you’re just looking at a bunch of chalk drawings.
Yeah.
But if you could actually see that dividing, that would be huge. The only other way I could do it is bring a microscope in with slides, and that gets pretty technical. So I saw that as a very signifier accent way that I could get students engaged, help them to see the process, the cycle, whatever it was in a way that is very visual. And I thought that’s that’s huge. And of course now with the Internet, I mean, that stuff’s just like so easy now. But.
Well, yeah, I mean, how, how were you getting those skills? Like, how are you teaching yourself? It’s not like you can go online and look it up.
I mean, no, there was no online at that time, so I would read some manuals, but I’m pretty I don’t know. I got this from my dad. I think he could look at he could look at something like plumbing or electrical problem or mechanical problem. And he was brilliant at being able to figure out how that worked mechanically and how it could be repaired or how can be salvaged or whatever. And that’s what he did professionally. Eventually. And so I think I got a little bit of that where I could kind of be a self-starter.
And if I knew some of the basics about how something operated, I could probably figure out how to hack it to do the thing I wanted. That’s amazing. Like, so, so so you have those instances, you’re still a biology teacher and then you take on this extra role of serializing the mice in the keyboard, in the computer together.
What are you tracking that and is that and the word processor? I don’t even know what you’re.
Yeah, it’s a spreadsheet. I’m trying to remember what the name of the product was. I can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t, you know, word or anything because it really didn’t exist yet. Word and Excel, and PowerPoint wasn’t the thing. But, you know, it’s just a simple it was a simple database program is what I used. Oh, gosh, I can’t remember what it’s called now, but anyway, there was a lot of simple stuff that was just coming out at the time that, you know, most people didn’t even know what it was or how it worked. But I thought I could probably build a database. And then eventually I realized that if I want to get paid a little bit more money yet, I could get a master’s degree in something educationally related. And so I thought about, Well, I have to make a decision now. Am I going to go and get my master’s in kinesiology, which is what I was seriously thinking about, because biology kinesiology matches up pretty good for certain professional fields that I was kind of interested in.
Or do I actually shift completely and go into a more technologically focused master’s, which there were a few, and I was just engaged, and I thought, well, I should probably take classes in the summer, but we’re getting married. And I was talking to a professor, and he said, You know what? My class is only six weeks long. You should take it this summer. And I said, Well, when is it? And he said, Well, it starts in June and ends in July. It’s like, okay, well, the problem is that I’ll be in class for two weeks. I’ll get married, I’ll be gone on my honeymoon for two weeks, and then I’ll come back for the last two weeks. I said, I’m not sure that’s going to work is like, It’ll work fine.
You go ahead, and you do that, and I’ll make sure you’re caught up. And so I thought, okay, well, I’ll go ahead and take that class, because it was kind of an intro to this to this degree field and thought, Well, that’ll give me an idea of if I want to get a degree in this or not. So I did it, and I got my, and I decided to keep going with it. But with a degree in instructional systems technology at IU.
Incredible so you, you end up getting your masters how many summers that take.
Oh it took a lot of summers and a lot of I was one of those guys that, you know, would run down I would run down to the athletic training room, get all my stuff taken care of there, try to get out of there by 545, run home, have a quick meal, then drive downtown to cakes, class that IP away and then get home. And my wife and kids would be sleeping, you know, So I figured that was worth doing intensively for two years and trying to get that degree done and then kind of moving on. So my son at the time was super young, so I’m not sure he even knew that I wasn’t there as much. But yeah, that’s all we did.
Yeah, that’s what I told my wife early on was like, they won’t remember me not being there all the time.
But she needed my help was the thing. Yeah. Realize, you know, and, and so that made it more difficult for our marriage a little bit. But we worked through that just fine. But you know, these are the things that you kind of don’t always know everything when you’re that age and you make some mistakes. But we worked through it.
Yeah, those conversations are hard. I remember when I first started the business, really my first probably four, eight years of the 12 years I’ve been in business of like, it’s going to be worth it. It’s going to be worth that. I’ve got to have that freedom. I think just in the last year, year and a half, I was like, okay, I’m starting to feel it a little bit. But you’re right. Like, especially when you have young kids at home and stuff, it’s a huge sacrifice and I think feel like, Oh, you’re working so hard. Then really when you start thinking about, it’s like, Man, my wife has had to take on a lot of it too. It’s like.
Whichever spouse it is, it’s it makes it very challenging and it’s something we don’t always acknowledge when we’re in the middle of it. But yeah, I just want to say she was a rock star and, you know, she’s she’s a principal now, but she was an elementary teacher at the time, fourth grade, but she decided to stay home. You know, for that period of time, which was that was the thing that saved us and maybe saved our marriage. I don’t know. But I’ll give her the credit for all of that.
That’s incredible. So you end up getting your master’s, is it you still have your teaching job, obviously. How how quickly do you start moving into more of a tech role in schools or what? What does your career progression look like after that?
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting, you know, because I was super involved at the high school. You know, I was involved in all the athletic teams. I was sponsor of two clubs and, you know, top full time as well. I knew the school really well. So when it came time for the school to get renovated, they were looking for some people that knew the school really well that can kind of be on a committee.
So I got picked for that. I said, Sure, I’ll help with that. And I had already been helping with a rudimentary tech committee for the district at that time and was on that. So what they were interested in for me initially was we just want to understand a little bit more about how do we integrate technology. You know, you use this thing with a TV, like should we use TV’s in all the rooms and this, that and the other thing? So that was the initial part of the conversation. And one thing led to another that all of a sudden this started to become more of my job. They took away some of my intro biology classes and said, We want you to focus a little bit more on this part. So I started getting involved really in the facilities side of things because what they realized was that I had the capacity to not just talk about the technology, but I could talk about the plumbing, the electrical, you know, the wood on the on the basketball floor.
I like I kind of knew where all the closets and everything was in the building, you know, And we had a network at the time. So I was kind of the go to person for any questions from the architects or the construction management team. So all of a sudden I’m in all the construction management meetings. So it kind of morphed over a period of time with the schools getting renovated. And then we did our career center, and they’re like, We know you’re not involved there, but we want you to help us in the same way with that. So that all was happening about the same time that Wayne Township was looking for someone to come in and be like a project management person that new facilities, but also knew the technology because they were they had a very aggressive plan to renovate every single school and incorporate technology in as a part of it is a very special kind of a focus so that they asked me to come over there and I said, No, I’m not done here yet.
And after about nine months they asked me two more times and they said, This is the last time. If you don’t want this job, we’re going to find somebody else. And I said, okay, actually, it’s really a good time for me to put a ball in this over here. And so I can I can interview. And if you like what you see, you know, we can talk. So anyway, they brought me on, and that became my first administrative position.
So, I mean, this is like a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier. It, it seems like a trait I’m continuously getting is, is being a problem solver, like being able to solve problems because ultimately, you can’t I mean, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s impossible to know everything that’s going to be in your environment at all times.
It’s more of how can I be proactive and how can I respond to problems when they come up? Because it sounds like at that point, what year was that at Wayne when you hopped over?
Would have been ‘98.
Oh so very early on. Yeah. So really. Yeah. Like you’re mostly what have computer labs at that point. You don’t even have devices going to classrooms.
Yeah. They had computer labs in most of the schools but what they wanted was like a mini computer lab in every classroom. And then I talked him into putting projectors in every classroom because I saw that as significant improvement for the teachers. And I really started to try to learn more about universal design for learning UDL and kind of how it can help classrooms from a technology perspective. Because I saw in my master’s degree, I saw how that they kind of come together. UDL is kind of an architectural principle, but definitely it can be applied to adoption of technologies into classrooms and schools, and I’m still a very big proponent of that. We need to provide the best ramp for all students to get to a point of understanding.
And there’s easy ways to do that, especially when you’re buying. And in designing that is very hard later on. Yeah, so, you know, the example of that is, you know, a staircase instead of a ramp. You know, everybody can walk up the ramp only people that can walk can walk up the stairs, you know, So you either have to have both or just a ramp, you know, simple things like that. It doesn’t cost anymore. I really but if you design it in from the start, it makes a big difference.
Yeah, it’s like, yeah, that planning can save you a lot of headaches of trying to fix something in the future. Yeah, I agree with that. So 98 new tech director, facilities manager, what was like the actual role you’re hired on?
The title they call me technology supervisor because part of my job was to oversee the tech team. Then part of my job was being all these construction management meetings and to work closely with the facilities director and the architects and, and the CMS. And, at first they weren’t too sure what to make of me because they didn’t have anyone in the district that knew what I knew about that kind of thing, because now I had already been a part of to a renovation and a new construction I’m building.
And so at first it was just, you know, tell us where the data drop should be. And that was it. But after a year, it was all of a sudden just sort of like what had happened in my other opportunity. I’m involved in every little thing. And so then eventually kind of I had the opportunity to become assistant director assistant I’m sorry, it was assistant director of operations with the title? Yeah, with oversight of the technology team. So some of the things were happening in the district, and that’s kind of how that panned out. So now all of a sudden, Assistant of Operations, which includes everything from transportation to food services to the facilities custodial and then, oh yeah, by the way, that there’s a little other thing called it.
And so I learned a lot, and it was really great. And with everything I learned, I tried to, you know, try to make it better and easier, and I was always very focused on the classroom and what to the students and the teachers need and trying to get my staff to kind of have an understanding of that, but also kind of have a feedback loop, too, because there are a lot of things that the tech team knew that I couldn’t know in my role that could make those things better. So I needed to, you know, get information from them. Their input was really critical to being able to be successful in creating those the best classroom environment for the students and and for those teachers.
What was that transition like, going from being a teacher and then having a team and a team I’m assuming you inherited that was already there. Did you feel like you just kind of naturally had a leadership gift or was that kind of a learning curve? And then what things inside of that, whether you knew already or learned that were important with that transition?
Well, I always hated being in front of people. I always hated talking to people.
Great.
That’s my job. Yeah. But, you know, like, literally, I, I took the test to exempt myself from speech in college, and apparently not too many people either did it or passed it. But I did, because I just hated it so much. I was going to not take that class because part of that class was talking in front of people. You know. So interestingly, you know, that situation that I talked about that first got me into education with my swim coach in the biology class. He gave me a lot of confidence to try some other things.
And then then I had some opportunities in college to to lead a group. And before I knew it, people just assumed that I would run that thing, you know, which I still don’t have an understanding of why they would think that because I’m not sure I’m the best person. But but, you know, when you walk into the room and everyone looks at you like, okay, it’s time to start now, what are we doing? It was always a weird feeling for me. And even to this day, it’s some times kind of weird, even though I might have a title or something like that. We’re actually had expected, you know, as chief technology officer or whatever it is. But it always it was never it never felt natural to me. But then what was natural was then the next thing, which was, all right, well, no one else is doing this.
This is now your job. You’ve got to get up there and do that thing. It’s so it’s basically talking about being an introvert, having to be an extrovert in that situation. And and again, you know, I’m pretty adaptable. So I would just take that and run with it and do the best I could. And I hope that was good enough. And so in transitioning from not wanting to be even in the speech class to transitioning to deciding that I’m going to be in front of a group of students every time I wake up in the morning within an hour, you know, that was a weird feeling, but then it felt natural. So sometimes I think, you know, you’re the challenge is what might not feel natural at first might be natural.
You’ve just never been in water before, So you didn’t know that you could kind of swim. Yeah, you know, but someone throws you in and all of a sudden you’re trying it, you know, and you’re like, okay, well, I’m not too bad at this. And hopefully they’re there for you if you start drowning, you know? But a lot of times you have to you have to jump into deeper waters before you can understand whether you can handle that or not or what adjustments you have to make to handle that. And I talk about this sometimes with our, you know, CTO to be program here in Indiana got a program will have 18 people in it this year. We launched next week called CTO to be, and one of the things that this is for junior level leaders or people that are in the role but just got started to want to be a CTO or tech director, and you know, one of the things is that you sometimes have to be challenged to step into that leadership role.
So I want to encourage tech directors, find somebody on your team that you should be challenging to step into the next role because at some point you’re retiring or you’re leaving. Yeah, whatever. And you know, hopefully you’re not threatened by, you know, mentoring someone that might replace you. But I think it’s it’s a good challenge to all of us. And then to those people in that role, you might not think you could do it, but you won’t really know until you try a couple of things, you know? And that was true for me, definitely. And and so it felt weird going from the classroom into administrative role. And as a matter of fact, when I interviewed for the position they actually had one of the interviews was with the tech team and one of the techs said, okay, so you were a teacher and you kind of helped with some of the facility stuff, but you’ve never led a team.
What makes you think you can lead us? And I was like, Well, that’s a fair question, but I’ve let a lot of different things, and I’ve led a lot of different people. They just happened to be volunteers or they just happened to be students. And I said, I’m not saying you’re volunteers or that you’re students, but I’m saying that leadership is transferable. And I think therefore, I can make a good leader of this team, which I’m really impressed by. And I’m really glad you asked me that question because I wouldn’t want you to be led by someone that didn’t think they could lead. I guess that was a good enough answer because I got hired, and we had a good relationship right from the start. But, you know, you have to be challenged sometimes to step up into difficult situations or opportunities that you might not think you could do at first, but you might be surprised.
So inside of that, you have a new team. What characteristics would you say? Maybe say something you were good at when it comes to like either relating or relating to or motivating your team and maybe an area where you really had to work on or or an area like holding employees responsible or stuff like that.
I was pretty used to holding students responsible. So I think there’s a direct correlation with being able to hold employees responsible. And I’ve always had the opinion that it’s better to shoot straight with someone than to beat around the bush or to let things slip. And then all of a sudden everyone’s unhappy. And so that wasn’t that challenging thing. I think the big thing was for me to realize how big I had to stretch my arms to get around all the different response abilities of that role in the first year. And the biggest thing that they had me focus on because I wasn’t too focused on the facilities operations renovation part as much yet was they said our work orders are out of control and you need to figure something out.
So I said, okay, well how do we do it? And you know, where are the work orders? And they took me down the hall and they had a bunch of shower boards on the wall that were used as dry marker boards. So there were probably seven shower boards on their side with just a bunch of lines on them. And everyone wrote what was going on. So they had a person that answered the phone. And of course, this was like not even 2000, right? We were getting ready for Y2K. Excuse me. But so what I realized was that no one ever looked at that board like they wrote stuff on it. But then they would when they didn’t have anything else to do, they would go over there and look for it.
So I said, okay, so what we’re going to do is every week we’re going to meet here Tuesday at 830 saying, get your first couple of things done the morning, and then we’re going to have an 830 meeting and we’re going to sit and we’re going to go through all of these. And if it takes us all morning, we’re going to go through all of these. And if they’re less than we don’t take as much time on this. And so that’s how we started with like whatever, 200 little squares with things that were work orders on them. And we started knocking them out because they prioritized it for them. And so that eventually turned into a meeting that we had for 24 years. That was what we call the status meeting, and that was where we would just check on how everything’s going on, all the different projects we had, because I always said, Well, look, we got work orders on this side.
That’s just like the daily churn and then we got project and this side. So at the status meeting is going to change from being work orders because you guys are doing so great at this now. I’ll be checking on it and we’ll deal with that with email and then we’ll look at this other side of projects because we’ve got a lot of things we got to do project wise. And so that became the status meeting.
I love that. I think having I’ve read a lot of business books and one of the best things we implemented is each one of our teams has a weekly meeting every week, has the same structure, has the same process. And just that because every single when we would do reviews, it was like we need better communication.
It’s like, Well, we’re always here to talk. And since we’ve implemented those meetings, communication is no longer one of the biggest concerns a lot of people have is like, No, I know exactly what’s expected of me and I know exactly who to go to. I know exactly what I’m responsible for
You have to center people on what’s important, you know the organization to you as individuals and as a leader. One of the key things, you know, your key job is to provide vision. Yeah, your key job is to provide direction. And your key job is to provide resources like that’s what you do. And part of that is positive feedback to the team. But like it could be simplified to that, right? I think like with the vision, they understand what’s coming and what they should be thinking about.
You know, that’s going to require certain resources, you know, but then you also have to have that point of contact, like I said, which was our status meetings and what what originally was the case, I’m going to change this was that I wrote down all the projects and I report out on all the projects and I took all the notes. You see the problem with that, right? So after I realized that’s probably not the best way to do it, we had a shared word, doc, and I would say, okay, well, this is your project. I’m putting your initials on it. This is your project and putting your initials on it. And then, you know, I helped to manage the project and I was also updated every week.
But it was their job to make the changes. It was their job to report out. And it was my job to take to put my take of what they said in there. And I would always that would always be a little bit flavored with Pete’s perspective. Right? Because part of that was me tying it into the vision. Yeah, right. And saying, Well, I know what you would like to do is this. But the bigger vision that I have from the superintendent and the school board is we got to do a slight variation of that. So this is the way we’re going to kind of look at it like I have to provide, you know, what’s the perspective we’re going to look at it from.
So that’s I would do and that’s why I was the note taker every year of the meetings. But then they would do the updates, you know?
Yeah, I love that. So that’s early. 2000s. Obviously, you had a you had a long career in technology. Can you walk us through like some milestones because obviously you you were a part of the biggest transition of technology in schools in history.
Can you walked through some milestones and problems and issues you had to navigate through over the next 20 years.
Wow. I like the way you put that. That hits hard, I think. But yeah, I mean, clearly we went from, you know, databases. I can’t even remember the name of we’re running on Apple to eat what we have now. It was pretty significant, right? And it does impact instruction and it does impact the way we do our jobs. And I think that there were several critical things. I mean, what’s interesting, it’s usually not the things we think of, You know, I mean, I remember when I first got started there, it was all about Y2K, which we know is like not a big deal.
Right. But that we were very focused on that. But it was a nothing burger, you know. Yeah, but then there are other things that sometimes you didn’t realize how important they were until you started getting into it. And you’re like, Wow, that’s pretty. That’s huge. So when we first started the project There in Wayne, it was all about, you know, getting you got to have five computers in every room and a printer and the teachers computer. Yeah, pretty straightforward. But course I had to challenge that with adding a projector. Yeah. I was like, you know, we can afford a projector in each room. And the architect said, Oh, I can do that. We can put TVs in the rooms, but we can’t put projectors in the rooms. No one does that. And I said, Well, I think a projector is bigger and better.
It doesn’t a scan converter, You got a 70 inch screen, show me a TV that’s got 70 inches that isn’t also 70 inches deep. Right. And and if you’re in the back of the room, you can’t see the TV and it’s scanning cameras. So even if you could see the TV, you can’t read anything. So honestly, I think that’s a waste of money. We’re not doing it unless we can do projectors. And they’re like, well, we don’t know how to do that. And I said, Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re just going to put a power plug up there and you’re going to provide a path me to the teacher’s desk. That’s all you need to do. Okay, we can do that. And then my team then about, you know, buying the projectors, figuring out how do we hang them from the ceiling, because they literally didn’t make ceiling mounts that were affordable. Like a ceiling mount was like $500. Right. Because you put on an executive board room and that’s all you’re going to put them in, You know, a thousand classrooms, you going to have a cheaper way to do it.
So I literally went a sheet metal fabricator and I said, all right, I want to mount these in the ceiling. We’ve got ceiling tiles. Help me figure out how to do this. So we basically invented like the panel that you cannot these projectors in and that we figured out like you could take out the little feet of the projectors and put in what they call a rivet knot and then screw them together and hang that projector up for 35 bucks per room. So, like, I had to find a way to do it cheaply because we didn’t have a lot of extra money. And that’s how we got these projectors in all the classrooms. And by the time I left Wayne, we had replaced everything three or four times, I think eventually with projectors that, you know, we’re using LEDs and bulbs. You know, they created their own problems.
You know, they made a noise. There is a bulb that have to be replaced every couple of hundred hours. But it really helped the teacher, just like I said with my ptosis example, show the student what they were talking about. And then with the advent of the Internet, take virtual field trips to anywhere in the world, right? I mean, that’s invaluable. So to me, that was a significant change and something we could do for instruction, a degree like, you know, you look at Google Docs, that was the easiest professional development we ever did. We showed people, and they immediately were like, We need that because they saw the benefit of the collaboration simultaneously at the same dock at the same time, you know, So that was huge.
Obviously wireless in every room. Yeah, it was huge. I’d say that it phones in every room for a period of time was huge because teachers didn’t have cell phones. And even if they did these days, actually our buildings were like Faraday cages. You could hardly get out of the cell signal. But, you know, so having that classroom phone changed some things with classroom discipline and opportunities for teachers to talk to parents. So I think that was one of those changes that maybe didn’t get as much attention as something splashy, like apps in every classroom, you know, wireless devices. You know, I think that was pretty significant. We pulled out all our printers and went to centralized printing that was significant from a budgetary standpoint, but also increased it. It decrease the amount of printing.
So we did more stuff online. So that created a natural shift. Instead of having that printer, you know, in your room, sometimes you do I don’t know if that’s a devious thing, but sometimes you do things because you’re hoping for another outcome, you know, and I did want to centralize printing to save money, but I also thought, well, it will decrease printing because it’s just not as convenient. And honestly, when we adopted our Chromebooks, we did not set them to print. So you couldn’t print from a Chromebook, you could only print from a PC which worked out because you could just pull that thing up at a PC connected to, you know, the centralized printer. But what it encouraged was the use of Google Docs more deeply and the use of an element more deeply, the use of, you know, those online tools in a way that people would have reverted to paper if they could have printed everything.
So I think those were all pretty significant changes. I’m sure there were others.
Oh, yeah. I mean, I always thought about that of, you know, in education you have teachers who have been there for 20, 30, 40 years or have done things a specific way. It’s like, how do you very kindly nudge them in the direction of, Hey, we’re getting rid of paper or we’re using these devices? And I’m sure not everybody was always happy
When they didn’t like the idea of paperless, but I did like the idea of less paper.
Yeah, yeah. And I think I think with, with, with a lot of these areas where industries are changing, it’s like going cold turkey is, is not really an option and you’re not going to get adoption. But you know, the slow transition seems to always end up actually having long term.
Well, it’s just like you said, with leadership, you may not think you’re up for it until you try it. And many times, you know, that’s true of all of us in a lot of situations. You may think I have to print until you realize, oh, there’s a better way to do this, you know?
Yeah. So you get through this career, you make all these milestones. What is an area of when you were a tech director, you had to spend a lot of time on that people might not think about. Because I know when we were talking earlier today, you talked about understood the importance of understanding the financial side. Can you talk about how you got involved in that and maybe the importance of that?
Yeah, I think one of the things we’re working on right now with our state, ASBO, is a way for technology leaders to be able to get training from school finance people that are the professionals at this. They it’s almost a black art school business, school finance. It’s not, it’s not that it’s impossible to understand. It’s just that not too many people explain it. And, you know, a lot isn’t documented, easily accessible, even in this day of YouTube videos. I don’t know of a YouTuber that specializes in that. You know, I would watch them if I could find them, but I think that is definitely a daunting area for many of us. And it really any leadership role in the district. The CFO, the business official, they have amazing power because they’re in charge of the checkbook and I think that’s appropriate.
They’re usually the right hand woman or man to their superintendent, in many cases even having greater functional impact than an assistant superintendent. And I see a functional impact because, you know, they buy the stuff and and pay for things. So it’s a hugely important thing to understand as a technology leader. But it’s very there’s a dearth of information about it. And honestly, it increased and complication because every state is different. Yes. And so learning that wasn’t necessarily an objective of mine until I realized how complicated it was and how it could benefit my department if I could understand it. And so thankfully, I had a really great CFOs that I’ve worked with. Initially it was Dennis Tackett and Wayne and fantastic guy that I still get together with every once in a while.
But he was a well-respected CFO who really knew how to do that job well. And part of the job there is to help the district stay in a good financial position. And part of that job is to be the gatekeeper of funds. And yet what I found out was that he was willing to open the gate for certain types of things. And I was trying to figure out, like, how do I get a part of that grant or how do I get, you know, these things are needed, but I don’t have a budget for how do I increase my budget to take care of it? Like cybersecurity recently has been a very important aspect of that. Not too many people had line item six years ago for that.
Yeah. And then of course, the last two years we’ve seen a huge, you know, targeting of K 12 with cyber. And so a lot of folks don’t have those dollars. You have to figure out how you get there and how do you increase your budget. It might be as simple as just asking for half a million dollars, but usually aren’t going to get that right. And so you have to understand how finance works in schools and what they need is lead time. So like they may be able to give you 70,000 right now to get you started, but if you need a half a million, you need to give them a couple of years to get that in. And so how does that in how do you have those conversations and how do you justify that?
That’s something should have a line item for continuous replacement and things like that. And so that does take some knowledge and I was really thankful that Dennis was willing to share those types of things with me and what really all he was doing was he was helping me understand what their process was and that things do have a process and I can’t just walk in and ask for a quarter million dollars or something. Right. Which I knew that. But, but I didn’t know how to get the thing I needed. And then he was followed by Berry Gardner, who’s recently left there. And he was also a brilliant mind in a different way. He really understood and and helped us to do some things with how we did bonds and that sort of thing.
And you know, just financial instruments and how to manage the dollars you had during a period of, you know, a lot of stimulus money the last several years from Esser And you know, how you could leverage, you know, dollars that might be coming to you from the feds to get things done but not become too dependent on them. Yeah, right. So it was you know, I never stopped learning about that. And I think it’s one of those types of things where you know, it just changes. And so over time, you have to keep up with that. And it’s a very important thing to invest your time in. But not a lot of people are willing to talk about it. So I’m really thankful to those two guys that that helped me along with that
That’s awesome. So on a on a personal note, you know, obviously you were in a really high stress position. What did you do personally or what personal disciplines morning routine did you do to kind of fill your cup?
And this is very personal to each of us in terms of like what you do. Some things we charge people, some things just charge people. And so like I said, I’m a bit of an introvert, so my morning routine was typically, you know, my wife would wake up way early in the morning and she’d be working out at 430 or something like that. And I would say a little bit longer. But then I wake up, I’d have to have a cup of coffee and then I’d have a time of reading. You know, for me it was scripture and, you know, taking time to just think about what’s most important in this day, you know, lift those things up and kind of think about my family, you know, what do I want to accomplish with them on a personal level?
What things should I be, you know, petitioning for there And and I didn’t take a long time to do that. I used to try to journal and stuff like that. And honestly, that isn’t how I work with my mind that ended up being difficult for me. So I dropped all that. So it was pretty simple like that. And then, you know, get out of get out of the place. And then I would then kind of circle back in the evening as in the time of closure, you know, for the day. And I think having those types of rhythms or cycles helps to ground you in a way that I think is positive, because we could easily be taken over by worry about, you know, whatever the project is not going well.
We do a lot of things that are pretty high stakes, you know, and I’ve tossed around those numbers of hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars, you know, I mean, you don’t want to be the one responsible for a failure of something like that or or a system that people are highly dependent on, you know, and you want something that’s going to look good, lasts a long time, have a positive impression on your community, because, you know, in many places the school is the center of the community. You know, we didn’t have a main street in Wayne, but we said, you know, our schools are are that place. Every school is a bit of a main street for our community. And as a part of the technology or the operations team, you know, you’re intimately involved with crafting and maintaining that that’s a big responsibility. And so you have to have some practice in your day.
I would also try to walk, you know, and I think a lot when I walk and my wife got me into that, you know, counting steps and stuff like that years ago. And that is also therapeutic for me as well as on the weekends, you know, getting out into the state parks and stuff like that. I love that.
It’s awesome. Yeah, same walking. I had listened to a guy who talked about weight loss and it talked about when he ran, he would just be super hungry all the time. He’d never lose weight. But he talked about walking like really helps like curb a lot of your a lot of like your appetite and stuff like later on in the day. And that was a big transformation for me because it was the same thing. Like now I’m running every day, but 8:00 at night he’s hungry. I have a boy ice cream because I’m not going to make it. And walking was it was huge. And I’m same way to thinking I like I just to be moving all the time to be able to think about a lot of that stuff.
So I agree. So coming to a close, you’re retired now?
In theory.
In theory?
Retired from the district. Yeah.
Can you talk about that transition and then talk about kind of what you’re doing now?
Yeah. So, you know, there comes a time in everyone’s career where you’re kind of like, you know, maybe it’s time to retire. And what does that mean for me? You know, can we do that financially? And if those answers are positive, you know, you have to decide, what are you going to do? Are you going to go into just sort of like I’m just going to leave everything behind, which that’s what my dad did. But I think that was a little detrimental to his mental health, you know, because unfortunately, however hard we try, some aspect of who we are is wrapped up in the work we do.
Yeah. And I think that we’re all put here to do good work. Yeah. For our entire lives. So for me, hitting the golf course, which I don’t golf or the disc golf course, maybe, or even just hiking and that’s it. It doesn’t do it for me, you know? It’s not what I was made for, I don’t think. And so as I thought about, you know, leaving a job that, you know, take 75 hours a week, the first goal was, let’s not do that anymore, but let’s find other things. And I had always had I don’t know if I want to call it a parallel life, but because I lived on one side of town and worked on the other side of town, I had some degree of separation between my day to day job and where I spent my time during the day and where I went to with my family.
And that turned out to be good. That was a whole other part of my life as scoutmaster and, you know, church member and yeah, you know, all those sort of things. And so it was easy for me to transition there. But also I had become over the years very involved in Coast and National School networking in the Indiana City Council was those boards. And so there was a natural outlet there. And so in, you know, leaving, the very first thing I did was I disappeared and went canoeing in the boundary waters for, you know, two weeks and then was back for a little bit. And then my wife and I disappeared to Tennessee in the mountains and North Carolina. And, you know, those were just times of just like separation.
And, you know, it was my way of leaving behind. And then I said, well, I now need to shift gears and what am I doing next? And so I, I started sole proprietorship just strategics, which was like a consulting firm to help schools and businesses with what I knew, I figured that had some value and then also continued and I’m a the executive director of the Indiana City Council. I’ve come off the board, of COSN in in the Indiana City Council and working in that capacity and with that job really focused on leadership development and working with other leadership organizations around the state. And then for COSN at the same time, as you know, all this was happening, AI started to be a thing that we were talking about generative AI and Keith Krueger, who is the CEO, said, Hey, would you mind being our subject matter expert on AI?
Because I think you know a little bit about it already and could dig deeper, but I need someone that I could kind of toss that to because we’re going to start getting a lot of opportunities and questions and we need documents written and I need a point person for that. And so I became the rest of me and generative AI and have done a bunch of presentations to superintendents and tech directors since January was released because that’s when it exploded, right? Yeah. And so, yeah, that’s all kept me a little bit busy and that’s how I like it.
Yeah. I just want to say thank you for all you’ve done for education and you’ve you’re an inspiration to a lot of people in this industry. And I look forward to continuing to, to work with you on your subject matter expert stuff. And I look forward to seeing what you do with the rest of your career. I appreciate you being on.
Thanks Zach. It’s been a pleasure. It’s fun to reflect on were we’ve been I’d encourage everyone to do that every once in a while. Yeah. Thanks.
Thanks, Pete.
In Episode 33, Hope Davis, MA, CHC takes us on a journey from personal challenges to leading educational innovation at Teach Tech U. Discover how her experiences fueled a passion for transformative technology in education, shaping the future with Project LEAR. An inspiring conversation for anyone intrigued by the power of tech to change lives. […]
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With guest speaker Marsha Maxwell, PhD, CETL, join us for a reflective journey on the advancements of AI through the years, focusing on how we can further develop these technologies to bridge educational divides.
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