Staying Connected

When West Chester Area (Pa.) School District set its sights on becoming a technology-forward district, Director of Information Technology June Garwin began juggling two timeframes: short-term (five to 10 years) and long-term (10-plus years). That’s when reality hit her.

“Technology isn’t the issue as much as information,” she says.

It was an important revelation for a school district that was lagging behind its neighboring districts in technology less than 10 years ago. The school board took a stand against such a negative reputation, and suddenly West Chester’s education system went from virtually no computers to a PC on every teacher’s and administrator’s desk.

But technology alone won’t advance educational goals, as Garwin knows. In order to ensure she isn’t wasting investment dollars, she stresses two goals with every technology purchase: connectivity and effectiveness. Here is a detailed look at both.

Connectivity

Information works best, of course, when it’s communicated, so staying in touch is emphasized within the West Chester Area community. For starters, every K–12 student, teacher and faculty member is assigned a Microsoft Outlook e-mail account. The phone system runs over a fiber network and features an auto-dialer to blast voice messages to all parents in their homes.

Many teachers choose to use an online learning-management system, which allows them to communicate directly with students on announcements, lesson recaps, homework assignments and chat boards. If teachers prefer to build their own Web sites, Garwin supports several template versions, so all they have to do is fill in a template. One teacher uses an online chat feature to communicate with his students in real time whenever a substitute is warming his chair.

Teachers and faculty stay connected through SharePoint, Microsoft’s Web-based collaboration and document-management platform, which they refer to as their data dashboard. “Whenever a teacher or administrator logs on in the morning, their dashboard comes up with internal announcements, reminders on key effectiveness indicators for each grade level, helpful links and discussion boards,” Garwin explains.

And then there’s Intouch Online, West Chester’s parent communication system that keeps adults in the loop on individual students’ classroom assignments, attendance and grades. Gina Lombardi, a parent with two children in the school district, would be lost without it. “It’s very helpful to be able to monitor your children and help them if they need [it]. A lot of times, you won’t get that information,” she says. It also helped when her daughter missed school from an illness, allowing Lombardi to communicate directly with teachers and make sure she and her daughter understood the make-up schedules.

Lombardi typically checks Intouch once or twice a week; as co-chair of the district’s Parent-Teacher Organization Council, she has talked to parents who log on every night. William Bailey, assistant principal of West Chester East High School, also makes this a routine stop every Wednesday, when teachers are expected to update grade posts. “If I see someone hasn’t entered grades for the last month, I know there’s a problem I need to address,” he says.

“Not only does something like Intouch create a greater ability among teachers to use technology, it also transfers into the community at large,” he adds. “People who didn’t buy computers before will now so they can access [this].” In fact, the district has established a program with local corporations to distribute desktops they no longer use to needy families. “It’s not just the upper middle class participating,” Bailey insists. “We’ve done a wonderful job of building a bridge between school, home and the community when it comes to using technology.”

Effectiveness

Attitude may be the most important ingredient for becoming a tech-forward district, but Garwin admits enthusiasm alone can’t move a district from worst to first. That’s why, following recommendations from expert sources, such as the Michigan Technology Staffing Guidelines, she allots 35 percent of the department’s budget to training and support. After all, “You can’t expect people to use technology if it’s going to be problematic,” she notes.

So the district implemented a five-year replacement schedule for nearly everything in its infrastructure, including computers. During that cycle, each component receives regular maintenance, and as it reaches the end of the timeframe, Garwin evaluates it for effectiveness. “There may be a cheaper solution, a better solution and we might not need it any more,” she explains.

Grants also help. To date, West Chester has twice landed money from the state’s Classrooms of the Future program.

Even with money set aside for training, the district accomplishes much of what it needs by using its own teachers. According to Mary Beth Clifton, instructional technology coordinator, teachers using the technology in their classrooms make the best instructors. “They facilitate our staff development, because the other teachers respect them,” she says. “Many times it’s better to hear from your peers than someone outside the district. They have the same struggles, the same equipment, etc.”

Clifton gathers presenters strictly on a volunteer basis, “because it doesn’t work well when you point fingers at people and tell them they have to do something,” she says. Instead, she invites savvy teachers to write proposals of technology tricks and inside knowledge they’d like to share, and she arranges those into more formal training sessions. Her strategy is spot on, in Bailey’s experience.

“There were a lot of people dragging their feet, not really wanting to change,” Bailey says of the early days. “But technology has built better working relationships. Within my building, we’ve built small communities made of young teachers helping veterans and vice versa.”

Finally, Clifton makes sure the support and training aren’t wasted on the daily scene. She established technology liaisons at each school to serve as resources for teachers, and also to meet with her monthly to share how teachers in that school are building technology into their curriculums. “I’m not looking to see how much someone used a laptop,” Clifton explains. “I want to know what they are doing to improve a lesson on the rainforest — did they use a Web cam? Did they keep the students engaged? After all, we’re getting students ready for the 21st century, not teaching them how to type on a keyboard.”