91Pro’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.”

91Pro’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.

91Pro is 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.'”

91Pro’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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If it wasn’t for the tree that nearly crushed his truck six years ago, Wallowa County ESD Technology Director Josh Kesecker might never have taken to ham radio.

He was out cutting down trees for firewood, and a close call with one could have rendered his car undrivable.

“‘If I’m out there operating a chainsaw and, heaven forbid, there’s a really bad accident, I’d be unable to get myself help,'” he recalls himself thinking. “There’s no cell phone signal, no 3G, nothing way out in the woods. There’s vast areas of my region where there’s no coverage of anything except maybe satellite.”

Now, Josh has an Extra license, the top licensing class available through the FCC. He’s already achieved his Technician License, which gives access to VHF and UHF bands, and General, which allows him to broadcast on HF band. The Extra License allows an operator to use the entire spectrum of frequencies available to amateur radio, save those reserved for fire and police.

Josh oversees technology for 900 students spread across more than 3,600 square miles. There is no ham radio club in his area; it’s too sparsely populated. But there was another sort of radio community out in the Wallowas, built around a sport most of us never think about.

Ham radio — which doesn’t actually stand for anything; someone said it insultingly in 1909 and then the community embraced it — is often seen as a relic, the dominion of very, very old men who like to recite puns at each other through crackly static. Yet a surprising number of folks in the edtech community embrace it, both as a hobby and a vital tool to keep their schools connected and safe.

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Ham radios are curious things. Some look like walkie talkies, others like a cable box, some look like your car stereo if you took it out of the dashboard (because they are in fact designed to be slotted in there, ideally with a big antenna mounted to the roof). You can spend $39 or $2,000 on the radio itself, but then there are also tuning units, power amplifiers, computers that control them via USB. Like so many tech hobbies, it’s easy to find yourself in financial quicksand.

When it’s searching with no information, it makes the same noise as a seashell you hold up to your ear. As you move through the frequencies, you hear chirps one associates with walkie talkies. When you finally hit on something, it might be the bleeps and bloops of Morse Code, people practicing their emergency broadcasting signals, or “rag chewing” (which often is the aforementioned pun-swapping). You can tune in to police, fire and even FAA frequencies, though you cannot speak on them.

You get the longest range when you shoot along the grey line, the edge of encroaching dawn or nightfall that you see on a world clock. It aids in radio propagation because of complicated changes in atmospheric layers; that’s when someone broadcasting from Oregon can hit New Zealand or even Antarctica. Hams have made connections with the International Space Station. In fact, if you’re in the right place, you can do that with a five-watt handheld.

Their terrain is the High Frequency, Very High Frequency, and Ultra High Frequency portions of the spectrum. High frequency wavelengths can be 20, 40, 60 or 160 meters, top to bottom, the height of a rogue wave or a Giant Sequoia or the Space Needle. The larger the height, the further it can travel, which is why ships used to use long-wave radio frequencies.

Ham radio isn’t Josh’s only wavelength work; he’s also dabbled in microwaves — which are in fact part of the radio wave spectrum. They don’t heat the water vapor in the air because they’re dispersed and not bouncing all over each other, like the ones in the metal box on your countertop.

“We built our own microwave radio network in the Wallowa Mountains to bring internet to all of my schools. I have a tower on one of the ridges at 7,000 feet, overlooking the valley. When all the phones are out and the internet is down, my schools can still talk to each other and make phone calls,” he said.

But his main ham activity happens once a year, when he and his son shelter under a canvas tent in the snow to serve as part of the official communications team for Oregon’s only Iditarod-qualifying dogsled race.

Each year, Josh Kesecker mans one of the checkpoints for the Eagle Cap Extreme Sled Dog Race in the Wallowas. As part of the communications team, he ensures communication between all checkpoints, checks in mushers as they pass, and helps dispatch and communicate with Search and Rescue if need be.

“We didn’t have a club like populated areas, but many of the ham radio people would volunteer for this sled dog race, so I said, ‘Sure, I’ll take a shift.’ I never predicted it would be fun, because I wasn’t into sled dog racing at all. I’m an IT guy, not a musher, but it felt great to support others.”

As the manager of the Salt Creek Summit Checkpoint of the Eagle Cap Extreme Sled Dog Race, Josh and his teenage son work together to check in mushers as they go through, coordinate communication between other checkpoints, and deploy search and rescue teams if need be.

“Sometimes the conditions get really bad and our systems that are linked together have problems, so having a skilled radio person in between has been important,” he said, adding that there was in fact a search and rescue needed a few years ago.

Now, Josh is introducing ham radio to the next generation.

“I didn’t realize that my teenager would enjoy it so much. He’s 15 and he’s been doing it for several years — he got his license for the race so he could help me out.”

Josh Kesecker teams up with his 15-year-old son, who has gotten his own ham radio license in order to help with the race.

About 284 miles to the northwest, Highline Public Schools CTO Mark Finstrom is using his Extra License to handle just about any emergency.

Inspired by a friend who was studying for the first exam, Mark began a journey that along the way included three levels of licensure, 28 FEMA certifications, and a snub-nosed school bus that would become a true Mobile Emergency Operations Center.

“Immediately, I saw the connection at the office, so I took a 50-foot, 85-passenger school bus and gutted it, then rebuilt it from the ground up.”

Ham radio inspired Mark Finstrom to transform an 85-passenger bus into a fully loaded mobile emergency ops center.

“It has fold-up desks in there, it’s fully carpeted, it’s got a 65-inch LED, four ham radios, police band, fire band, and then transportation and administrative bands for the district,” he said. “It’s totally self-sufficient, with two generators and internet via Cradlepoint hotspot. It’s got a weather station; it has high-def video cameras.”

In the belly of the bus live a vast array of emergency supplies — think 1,500 K95 masks, 10,000 gloves, laminated instructions that outline all CERT (certified emergency response team) roles. In the event of a disaster, Mark can assume any role, though he’s usually second-in-command after Scott Logan, the COO of the district.

“I can light up a football field with that bus,” Mark said.

All together, he said, the bus cost him about $50,000 to equip, and also serves as a mobile STEAM lab with 15 stations for elementary schools in the district. When it’s heading out to kids, some of the emergency supplies are replaced with big dry-tubs of instructional materials.

When used in an emergency, there is space for 12 to work inside the bus. As a mobile STEAM lab, there’s room for 15 kids to learn.

Then, there’s his personal equipment.

“I started with a BaoFeng uv-5r for $39,” he said. “Now, I have radios that range from the BaoFeng’s $39 up to $2,000.

“There are two in my vehicle at all times; one is mounted and one is not, and I have a ham radio in my office, at school and at home,” he said.

The bus is fully equipped for communication, including four ham radios, a J-pole and multi-function antenna tower, two 900Mhz radios, an 800Mhz radio, multi-carrier Cradle Point Access Point, cell carrier hotspots and more.

Both Josh and Mark emphasized that it’s not tough to get your start in ham radio. The initial license is easy to get — people have been known to pass the test using flashcards and just a few study sessions. There are also “cram and pass days” with local clubs, which is a one-day workshop with the test at the end.

“There are lots of free apps that help people study, and the questions in the apps are the actual bank of questions that are selected from,” Josh said. “And, of course, there are some great series on YouTube. Don’t be too daunted.”

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91Pro’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.

“About 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. 91Pro and 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 91Pro. 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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91Pro’s Spotlight is a series of stories, interviews and Q&As highlighting news and ideas from across the Northwest EdTech community.

Two days before Christmas, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown surprised educators across the state by announcing that schools should re-open as quickly as possible, and floating a Feb. 15 goal date. The Department of Education’s guidelines, she said, would now be “advisory rather than mandatory,” and each school district would have to decide on their own when and how to reopen.

However, with vaccination rates moving much slower than expected, OPB and other news outlets report that it’s unlikely that teachers — who are part of the 1B vaccination group, after healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities — will be fully vaccinated by then, leading to protests across the state and pushback from teachers’ unions.

It was a shock to educators. Just two days before Brown’s announcement, Beaverton CIO Steve Langford had said he imagined the district would finish the year remotely. Now, of course, that prediction seems unlikely.

Despite the uncertainty, several CIOs weighed in on what they’re facing in 2021, particularly as it relates to student achievement, future-proofing their own districts and absorbing the lessons of 2020.

Distance learning has failed millions of students across the country; one Oregon high school reported that 38% of their students were failing, as opposed to 8% in a normal year.

“We might have students where we don’t know if they’re ready for the next grade level,” Langford said. “Just because your birthday has passed and you’re a year older, that might not be the best indicator of being prepared for the next grade.”

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His district is discussing the possibility of summer outdoor intensives to assess where students are, and see if they can become ready for the next grade in that short time.

“If they haven’t mastered all the concepts in second grade, is moving to third grade a good idea for them?,” he asked.

But, he said, for some students distance learning has been a godsend, and in 2021 he hopes that schools writ large will abandon the one-size-fits-all theories of the past.

“We’ve never considered what is best for every individual student — it’s been education the way it has been for 100-plus years,” Langford said. “We have students who are thriving in this environment, so to return them to what was, just because we can, is wrong … the idea of a remote learning environment is something that should persist, depending on what the student needs.”

Idaho, which has a might higher percentage of in-person learning than either Oregon or Washington, has less uncertainty about how their schools will look, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t changes being made.

Gordon Howard, Director of Safe Schools at Bonneville School District in southeastern Idaho, said that in the coming year, his district plans to make sure students continue to have access to assignments around the clock.

The school district has been in-person, albeit with a slightly modified schedule (Mondays are for remedial instruction) for all of the 2020-21 school year, but of course there have been absences due to quarantine and illness.

“We’re using an LMS and online instruction, and there are many positives coming out of that,” he said, adding that his district began their 1:1 rollout just before the holiday break. “We are currently collaborating and putting course content online, which is helping us align our curriculum at the school and district level.”

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Over at North Clackamas School District, just outside of Portland, Executive Director of Technology Derrick Brown said he and his team plan to use this year (and the goodwill for edtech that 2020 engendered) to make sure their technology program is truly sustainable.

“We have 8,000 devices that will be at end-of-life in summer 2021. That’s about half of our students that have devices, and we didn’t plan for that,” he said.

One thing that vexed him (and pretty much everyone) was Chromebooks that were great for classroom use simply don’t have the firepower for distance learning.

“Those devices just aren’t holding up well in a remote learning environment. The devices did serve us well and met our needs when we were in the classroom; they just don’t have the processor and video capabilities to keep up with the demands of online learning,” he said.

But, he said, those are problems easily fixed compared to the logistical realities of in-person learning.

“Who knows what that’s going to look like?” he said. “It’s still our hope to have students back in schools, but schools that open are often shutting back down. How is the back-and-forth going to impact families?”

But he has a major point of optimism, one shared by many CIOs.

“Prior to this, technology departments were behind the curtain, and all of a sudden, the curtain’s pulled and we’re front and center,” he said. “Now superintendents, teaching and learning will be inviting tech to the table at the beginning of an idea instead of the end.”

“We’re forever changed. Not just education but as people, the world. People say we can’t go back to normal and we can’t. It’s new, and different, and exciting.”

On the sixth day of 2020, a small item ran in the Asia Pacific section of the New York Times, headed ‘China Grapples With Mystery Pneumonia-Like Illness’. 59 patients were experiencing “high fever, difficulty breathing and lung lesions … no deaths have been reported but seven people are critically ill.”

It is impossible to talk about 2020 without talking about coronavirus; it is also difficult to fully remember life before it, which sometimes makes 2020 feel like The Only Year. 2020 was a year of repeatedly entering pitch-black, lethally booby-trapped rooms, then being told to make the bed.

But despite all of this, it was a year of strange opportunities, with new paradigms, understandings, and a chance to think outside the box (the box having been destroyed by a meteor). Particularly for educational technologists, it was a year of at last being heard, having a long-denied seat at the table. It was a year when fantasies like 1:1 became a reality within days.

It was, in short, a year that cannot be forgotten. And so, let’s take a look back at the Year That Was, divided into seven distinct periods.

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As the educational technology community planned for a year that they did not expect would be so radically different than those that preceded it — debating flat panels versus projectors and which web filter was superior in the ACPE email threads — a threat began bubbling up into the American consciousness.

The Seattle Times had one article mentioning the coronavirus on Jan 11th, but by Jan. 31, there were 24, spanning all sections of the newspaper. While virologists and public health officials tried to raise the alarm, the only known cases in the U.S. were from those who had recently traveled from China.

For many school districts, it felt like a distant threat.

“It really hadn’t affected Idaho much. During January and even into February, it was not a big deal for us; it was something that was going on far away,” said Gordon Howard, director of Safe Schools for Bonneville School District, which serves 13,000 students in southeast Idaho.

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But even as there were very few cases, districts in and near larger cities started to form their game plans.

“We were talking about it at the district level by mid-February,” said Dr. Joe Morelock, superintendent of Newberg Public Schools. “With every passing day, it became more and more apparent that this was going to be a reality because of what was happening in Europe. It felt like there was no way we were going to keep this out of the U.S. and stop it from spreading.”

Despite that, and the district already having a pandemic emergency plan, there was quite a bit of scrambling.

“We started purchasing hotspots very quickly, and had 400 by the beginning of March,” he said. “I remember one Sunday, I was in Albany for my kid’s soccer game, and I ran around town to multiple Walgreens and Rite-Aid locations buying every touchless thermometer I could find.”

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Steve Langford, CIO of Beaverton School District, sent his first coronavirus-related staff note on March 1.

“There was one case of COVID in Washington County, and we’d formed a planning team at the district at the district to gauge response, just in case it became a pandemic, which is funny to think about now,” he said. “It was interesting — we were up in Bothell for an ACPE retreat, just a mile from the nursing homes that got hit. Overnight, it went from a single case to people panicking because entire assisted living homes were compromised.”

The first two weeks of March, he said, sent the district into overdrive.

“The district pandemic response team was meeting daily,” he said. “Plus, we were dealing with staff across the district who were very concerned about their health and welfare. We were looking at significant staffing issues as people chose not to come to work because they were scared.”

Any hopes that perhaps coronavirus would spare the Pacific Northwest were shattered on Feb. 27, when Northshore School District’s Bothell High School was closed after a staff member’s family member fell ill. Two days later, Washington had its first three cases of community spread (meaning there was no clear exposure point), with one dead and two critically ill.

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By March 2, there were 48 schools in Washington closed for coronavirus cleanings (a quaint notion, now!) and Northshore began to embark on its incredibly ambitious distance learning program, spun up over the course of just a few days.

Executive Director for Technology Allen Miedema discussed the situation in a March 13 91Pro panel discussion:

“We’re pushing devices out to kids, training teachers up on tools they hadn’t used before or might not be super familiar with, and teachers, for the most part, are enthusiastically embracing the idea, and trying to make it work,” he said, while adding that new state orders would modify the process somewhat.

Watch: 91Pro’s first Coronavirus Panel, held just before schools shuttered

During the same panel, Portland Public Schools CIO Don Wolff noted what would become so clear in the months since: Schools provide much, much more than just learning.

“We are not trying to deliver an online education yet … we’re going to use the next three weeks on our extended break to reevaluate what we can provide in a way to keep students engaged, connected to other students and their teachers, and let them know they’re not alone and not isolated in this scary time,” he said. “We’ve set up 18 hub sites where we’ll be delivering food to our students. Schools are a lot more than just a place where students learn. It’s where they’re taken care of, where they get medical care, where they get social care, where they get emotional care.”

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On Friday the 13th of March, the order went out across Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana: today will be your last day of class. Unspoken was the when of reopening: while some governors gave three-week timelines, it was clear that was an incredibly optimistic one, soon to be obliterated.

“It was about the third week of March that we started getting into discussions of what we were going to do as the state of Idaho mandated us to go fully online,” Gordon Howard said. “At that point in time, I don’t know if we had half a dozen cases in southeast Idaho. Hindsight is 20/20, but we looked at it as a knee jerk reaction — we weren’t preventing anything because there was nothing to prevent. We left for spring break and didn’t come physically back until August.”

Read More:The First Days of Distance Learning in Oregon and Washington

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March 6, we start wondering how deeply we’ll be affected in Oregon. ( and are in the midst of an early transition to learning at home in Washington).

— Rachel Wente-Chaney (@rwentechaney)

Note: Rachel Wente-Chaney’s twitter retelling of March using only Home Alone gifs is perhaps the most important contemporaneous text about the first month of COVID-19.

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As schools entered a new world, many technology directors saw long-held dreams come true, with 1:1 rollouts moving from the realm of fantasy into poncho-wearing staff handing Chromebooks through car windows.

In April, now-retired North Clackamas School District Director Technology Director Tricia George spoke to 91Pro about a dramatically changed landscape: “We’re passing out Chromebooks like nobody’s business,” she said at the time. “It’s funny — I’ve always wanted a take-home device program, and we did it in a week.”

In the same story, Mark Finstrom, chief technology officer for Highline Public Schools, noted his district had handed out 6,500 devices in a single week, with documents available in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Somali.

But enormous questions remained, specifically in the realm of digital equity. Students without broadband access at home already had worse learning outcomes than their connected peers, and what had been a hindrance to learning now made it an impossibility.

“We put a lot of effort into really quickly trying to spin up virtual education and from the ed side of things we were pretty dang great at it. And then we ran smack into the wall of the things we don’t have control over,” said Rachel Wente-Chaney, the CIO for High Desert ESD, in a recent interview. “It was the stress around elementary-aged childcare for parents who needed to go to work, home bandwidth and internet access, and adding new technical skills quickly for our teachers and district leadership teams.”

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Hotspots became a must, and tech directors got up close and personal with representatives from various cell networks and ISPs, trying to find plans that could get internet into the remotest of places. Districts made buses into mobile hotspots that could be deployed near apartment buildings, and spun-up help desks in multiple languages.

Read More: The Triumphs of 2020

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Sadly, there was no time for laurel-resting: It was clear that whatever was going to happen in the fall would be very different from any back-to-school in living memory.

May was still an early time in our understanding of coronavirus, and there was hope that perhaps it would fade with warmer weather (and not return in force until the winter) and that steps like plexiglass dividers, UV sterilization and distance between students could make classrooms safe. Plans were made for various hybrid models, rotating groups of kids between in-person and online learning.

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Then in late May, the country exploded. George Floyd was killed when a Milwaukee police officer kneeled on his neck for nine horrifying minutes as onlookers screamed. Within a week, the United States was seeing the largest protests for civil rights in its history, with between 15 and 26 million participants — dwarfing the numbers of the late 1960s. The protests rippled throughout culture, as well, with school boards and districts across the country adopting new anti-racism policies, and taking a fresh look at digital inequality as it relates to race, ethnicity and class.

There was another explosion happening across the country and cases were soaring, especially the Sun Belt, where it is generally too hot during the summer months to gather outside. Florida, Texas and Arizona were hit particularly hard; at one point, Texas Medical Center — the largest hospital complex in the world, which spans four area codes — was above 100% of their regular ICU capacity and had to convert beds.

In a late-August 91Pro survey, a full 60% of respondents — and 100% of large school district respondents — said they didn’t imagine they would have full schools at any point during the upcoming year.

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One employee at a large district said that “cohort isolation following a COVID diagnosis may deplete our sub pool and render in-person instruction impossible,” (this did come to pass for Idaho’s Caldwell School District, which closed in mid-October for a few days as 14% of teachers were on quarantine and subs were increasingly difficult to find). Someone from a small district said that schooling might never look the same again.

Some districts reported that despite state guidelines, they could not see re-opening to in-person learning without strong community support:

“Our district’s respect of parent, community, and staff opinions is so strong the district would not resume on-premise instruction if those groups felt it wasn’t safe to open,” an employee of a medium-sized Oregon district wrote, “even if state and federal guidelines allowed or required on-premise instruction.”

Read More: Coronavirus Survey Results

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As school openings approached — in-person or, more frequently in Oregon and Washington, fully online — educators held their breath.

Then, we actually couldn’t breathe as historic wildfires raced across the entire West Coast, blanketing states with hazardous air quality and apocalyptic orange skies.

Phoenix-Talent School District IT Manager Allan Quirós’ district was one of the hardest hit, with large swaths of the town completely leveled in the span of hours on Sept. 8. He and his team fled to an elementary school in the relatively-unscathed city of Medford, and within 48 hours, they had the district back up and running.

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“The first thing we had to do was move equipment from the district office — computers, firewall, content filter — because we had to resume normal operations like finance and HR. Obviously, people were going to be calling the district and we had no power there,” he said in a late September interview. “Little by little, everything started coming online. By Thursday of that week, we got our network up via hotspot, and were using our cell phones for phone service. By Friday, we had basic operations, including our financial systems and SIS, up and running.”

Earlier this week, Allan said that the school continues smoothly despite the devastation.

“Things are going well, and our district has been able to help the community and continue educating children despite this year’s events,” said, adding that they’re offering both comprehensive distance learning and limited in-person instruction. “We have an amazing team … I’m proud to be able to serve with them!”

Meanwhile, in Santiam Canyon School District, which contains the towns of Mill City, Gates, Detroit, Idanha and the surrounding areas, a large number of students and staff homes were completely destroyed.

In fact, Technology Director Sam Proctor said, the fires themselves spared the schools (aside from $2.5 million in smoke damage), but the district suffered a major loss of devices and equipment that had already been sent home.

“We had eight staff members who lost their houses, and we’d build whole home offices — keyboards, monitors, document cameras, headsets. We took a bigger loss there than with equipment on-site at the district,” he said in late September. “Luckily, we hadn’t yet handed out Chromebooks or devices to students.”

Despite all that, they were able to open schools on Sept. 30, with students and teachers sitting outside school buildings, using the strong WiFi that was up and running.

He, too, reported that his district has truly bounced back.

“We have had a huge amount of support from all over, locally and nationally. It’s been great,” he said. “Over the last month or so new equipment has been arriving, our new buildings are finally getting finished up, and the staff here have done any amazing job working with our families. We have gotten some learning hubs setup and will hopefully be bringing kids back in some form soon after the break.”

Read More How to Survive a Wildfire

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Meanwhile in Idaho, things were running on a very different track. The emphasis, from the governor downward, was to have as many schools open as possible, perhaps reflecting a . There were fewer state guidelines than in Oregon and Washington, with much more of an emphasis on local decision making.

“We started in May, and all summer long, we met as a district leadership team putting together a reopening team for August. We went through all the questions — what if we get positive cases? How do we quarantine?” said Bonneville’s Gordon Howard. “It ended up being a 40-page document. How you handle the business situation, how you handle lunch, even things like the water fountains in the schools … it was an exhaustive process.”

The district has been in school full-time since then, he said, with a few small modifications: Mondays at the secondary level are remedial time for those who are falling behind; the elementary schools do so every other Monday. All lessons are put online for students who have to quarantine.

“The kids that are exposed in school, what we’re finding is that only 1-2% are getting sick, so what that tells us is that kids are getting sick at activities outside of school,” he said. “We’ll do contact tracing — say ‘OK, Gordon is sick, and those kids who sat within six feet of me have to be quarantined for seven days, and if they don’t get sick they can come back.”

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Then in November came one of the most contentious elections in our lifetimes, with the country still deeply divided over the outcome.

But there was one thing that voters in both Oregon and Washington overwhelmingly agreed upon: the importance of funding schools. Bonds and levies passed overwhelmingly in both states, going 14 for 17 in Oregon and 100% in Washington.

Although it seemed like passing extra taxes during a severe downturn would be hard, in fact bond consultancies reported that the public had a newfound understanding of the important role schools play in our civic lives — and how crucial tech is to the process.

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Now, districts have big plans. Mark Finstrom, CTO of Highline Public Schools in SeaTac, is building out a 5G LTE network.

“We have a project currently underway, and are in the final stages of a 10GB multidirectional network capable of up to 100GB. This will be the backbone of our 5G network,” he said in November. “We’ve got a figure out, where we’re going to mount antennas and repeaters, locations — inside the building or outside the building, on light poles at the school or fields, and then we need to run it all back through our district.”

At Portland Public Schools, CTO Don Wolff is looking at $128.2 million earmarked for tech out of the massive $1.2-billion bond that voters passed 75-25.

In November, he reported a lot of fun projects on the horizon:

“The upside with CDL is that we’ve jumped five years ahead of where we would have been if we’d stayed in brick and mortar and ran traditional 1:1 deployments and adoptions” he said. “The downside is we’ve got classroom modernization needs, which will be addressed with this bond. Only about 33% of our schools have instructional wireless with no dead spots, and we have around 100 buildings.”

Read More Voters Say Yes to EdTech

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As 2020 draws to a close, we are in a place of both unprecedented danger and real optimism. The virus has spiked throughout the country, setting new case and death count records every few days. The post-Thanksgiving spike is just coming into full, terrifying view, and an anticipated Christmas spike may be much worse.

Yet within the last week, the FDA officially approved the last vaccine, and by the time you read this, Americans will have received the first non-trial vaccines. In Oregon, Gov. Brown anticipates having 100,000 vaccinated by the end of December. Washington State should have 400,000 doses in-hand as 2020 comes to a close, and Idaho is slated to get nearly 15,000 in just this week.

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In all three states, educators are part of the 1B group of those to be vaccinated, right in line behind medical workers and those living in long-term care facilities. It is entirely possible that many of you reading this will be vaccinated between mid-January and mid-February.

We are consumed by a monthslong final boss battle against a submicroscopic bit of genetic code neither alive nor dead. At the same time, we are finally in a place where we can look to a post-COVID future. From this brutal reckoning of a year, what is worth carrying forward with us?

“What I am most excited about is the communications increase, between the students, the teachers, and the parents, because we’ve provided options,” said North Clackamas Executive Director of Technology Derrick Brown. “Parent-teacher conference participation increased because we offered video and phone options instead of in-person. Technology provides so much flexibility.”

It has also, he said, proved the value in things technology departments have sought for decades, like 1:1 for secondary students and online learning.

“The devices we had were in classrooms, in carts, until we didn’t have a choice come March 16,” he said. “The question now is, are we going to pull them back? I’m thinking we might not. Now we know it’s a good idea for our students to have devices to continue learning, and teachers have increased interactions with families.”

Overall, he said, the biggest lesson of 2020 is the strength of educators, students and families.

“First and foremost, we’re resilient, and we can do this,” he said.

Steve Langford said that the pandemic has shaken the public educational system so much that it opened a once-in-a-lifetime chance for significant innovation.

“In IT especially, but even beyond IT, we’re starting to think about how we reimagine what we’re doing in education,” he said. “We’ve been forced to do things we didn’t think were possible in this crisis, and some things have been going really well.”

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“It was a year of making the least-worst decision,” said Rachel Wente-Chaney, laughing. But, she quickly added, it was a year where the different needs of individual students came to the forefront — and demonstrated how technology can be an incredibly important tool to meet those needs.

“There are those of us who, for the past decade, have wondered if all school could be virtual. We now have that answer, and it’s no,” she said. “But the paradox and irony is that in some, we learned the exact opposite, hearing, ‘My child has dreaded going to school for years because of bullying, disengagement, racism, or simply shyness and an introverted spirit.’ And we’re hearing stories of how parents are now seeing them thrive in an online environment.”

“So I think the thing we take with us is the understanding of how important in-person school is for some, and how important the flexibility of not having to be in-person is for others. It reaffirms the work that so many have been doing in K-12 education around differentiated learning.”

“The importance of giving students a or b, a choice that fits them — I think that’s really something to take from this year.”

School districts across Oregon and Washington have much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, as voters overwhelmingly approved bonds and levies on November’s ballot.

In Oregon, voters approved 14 of the 17 bonds and levies on the ballot, ranging from $2.1 million for upgrades to the 150-student Alsea School District’s campus to $1.2 billion for the nearly 50,000 students at Portland Public.

Up in Washington State, it appears that nearly every school bond and levy on the ballot was passed, from $600,000 for Grand Coulee School District to offset uncertainty in state funding up to a two-year, $32.5-million technology levy for Highline Public Schools.

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Mark Finstrom, CTO of Highline, has some big plans.

“We are planning to build a 5G LTE network, a business services HR software refresh and purchase interactive technology for the classroom — large screen displays and interactive tools,” he said. “We’re building interconnectivity between applications, so we’ve got data warehousing, student info data and mapping software to enhance, as well. Our personalized learning department will be providing a lot of training for staff.”

Of the 5G project, he said, “We have a project currently underway, and are in the final stages of a 10GB multidirectional network capable of up to 100GB. This will be the backbone of our 5G network. We’ve got a figure out, where we’re going to mount antennae and repeaters, locations — inside the building or outside the building, on light poles at the school or fields, and then we need to run it all back through our district.”

Newberg School District passed its own $141-million bond, and Dr. Luke Neff, Director of Strategic Partnerships, could not be more pleased.

“I am just so grateful to get to live and work in a community that supports public education and helping our kids,” he said. “On a personal note, it’s a huge relief. I’m tired of constantly writing grants to try to piece together the funding for the things we need. Comprehensive Distance Learning has really exposed the fact that we have not been able to have a sustainable funding cycle for staff and student technology.”

While the bulk of the money is earmarked for a new elementary school, an overhaul of CTE spaces, a school health center and more, there are quite a few fun tech bits.

“We’re making improvements ‘from soup to nuts’ — from the fiber coming in to the end user devices, fiber runs, server room updates, redundant firewalls, data closet security, switches, data drops, WAPs, PA systems, bell systems, digital clocks, wall cabling, security cameras, radios, all the way down to a staff device refresh and a refresh of our devices for our youngest learners,” he said, adding that some of these improvements are long overdue.

“Our high school bell system, for example is still not Y2K compliant — an administrator at the high school has to go into a data closet everyday to reset it by hand to the right schedule. That’s embarrassing. But it’s also expensive to fix, and now we can do that.”

He said a big focus is “future proofing” — how can they make changes now even as they know the technology will go through new iterations so fast?

“Take wall cabling,” he said. “Our buildings are wired for VGA, and those wall cables are failing rapidly. We’ve tried three or four different digital solutions at this point, and all of them failed too often and too quickly … so basically, instead of cables, we put in a conduit going to the projectors and we can run whatever cable we need in the future in those. USB-C, USB-K? That’s an example of how we’re trying to plan our projects in a way that provides solutions now and meets the needs of whatever future we live in.”

At Portland Public Schools, CTO Don Wolff is looking at $128.2 million earmarked for tech out of the massive $1.2-billion bond that voters passed 75-25.

“When I walked into PPS, I was inheriting at least a decade — maybe 15 years — of technical debt,” he said, adding that he’s broken the needs into distinct buckets of work.

First, there’s the 1:1 rollout for grades 3-12, and 2:1 for PK-grade 2. There’s a big teacher device replacement as they’re finding the Chromebooks they deployed in 2019 are not up to the task of CDL. They will be replaced in January with PixelBooks GOs.

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“We’re moving toward the Chrome OS as our primary OS in the district for ease of deployment and application support, maintenance, support, and the added security benefits a stateless OS provides,” he said, adding that support for a Windows machine takes, on average, 90 minutes from receipt to delivery, versus 14 minutes for Chrome OS devices.

“The upside with CDL is that we’ve jumped five years ahead of where we would have been if we’d stayed in brick and mortar and ran traditional 1:1 deployments and adoptions” he said. “The downside is we’ve got classroom modernization needs, which will be addressed with this bond. Only about 33% of our schools have instructional wireless with no dead spots, and we have around 100 buildings.”

Then, there’s the technical:

“We need to upgrade both our core and edge switching infrastructure, which hasn’t had the funding in the past to be on regular maintenance and upgrade schedules. We have older networking infrastructure in our buildings that needs addressing as well,” he said.

“Our fiber interconnects need to be transitioned to single-mode fiber, which will provide 10GB backbone speeds between closets. We need to upgrade and replace much of our datacenter hardware, replace our entire phone system and increase our internal and external security posture. Turns out we have 50,000 hostiles on the inside of our network as well,” he said, laughing.

But one of the biggest goals they’re looking to in the future is the possibility of helping to provide low or no-cost internet for families and students. Pilot programs are already being discussed for certain parts of the city.

“I am wildly excited and optimistic,” he said. “I am so proud of the people in the city of Portland — there was overwhelming support for this bond by 75% of the voters in the middle of this pandemic. It’s unbelievable support for students and the schools. I could not be happier with how the community stood up and supported this bond.”

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How do bonds and levies work?

Oregon and Washington do school funding a little bit differently. In each case, the state provides way, way less money than the schools need, so options for funding capital expense (think a new building, or renovations, a new roof — anything other than the strict day-to-day operational budget) are put to voters quite regularly.

In Oregon, nearly all funding for new construction and major facility remodels comes from bonds. All new schools are financed via bond — it would be virtually impossible for a school district to save up enough to pay for a new school outright. Current facilities also require upkeep, and schools need way more maintenance than even a dedicated crew can provide.

Bonds provide money up front, though they must be paid back, with interest, over a period of years (often 10 to 30). They are slowly paid back with increases in property taxes; in the case of a large bond, this could cost the average homeowner between $15 and $40 per month, although smaller bonds of course have a much smaller impact.

Up in Washington, levies are a much more common funding mechanism, with bonds being reserved for very long-term projects. As one school district site put it, “Bonds are for buildings; levies are for learning.”

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Executive Director for Technology at Northshore School District Allen Miedema is a bit of an accidental authority on the process, and explained more about funding models.

Levies provide the money slowly but monthly, with big chunks coming during tax times — for example, Allen said, Northshore’s current bond pays about $7 million each April and October but maybe only around $100,000 coming in during other months.

“In Washington, there are some really gross disparities between who can run a levy and have some hope for success, and who can’t,” he said, adding that it’s not just a haves vs. have nots — since levy collections are based on property taxes, the presence of a big mall or business area can drive the cost to homeowners way down, whereas towns that are mostly residential see much higher rates.

It also, he said, punishes smaller districts and less affluent districts, where you have to tax at a much higher rate to get similar money to places where the average home price is much, much higher.

“In rural areas where things aren’t as built up, maybe I have 40 acres and I’m going to pay this huge tax rate so the kids can have the same things that suburban districts do, but those suburban property owners are going to pay a quarter or even a tenth of what I’m paying. People came up with these plans on how to fund schools 180 years ago, and we don’t go back and fix things when they’re clearly broken. The only thing worse might be how you pay for schools in Oregon.”

True Tales of Tech Horror

Behold, the four categories of spooky technology happenings!

After exhaustive research that took upwards of three afternoons, the 91Pro Technology Horror Department has been able to successfully categorize terrifying stories into four principal buckets:

1. The Meltdown: Think thousands of Tier 1 tickets, or a server that is literally underwater. The problem is clear, but the solution is not.
2. The Infestations: Turns out humans aren’t the only animal that can get way into tech.
3. The Mystery: Something is clearly going wrong, but no one has any earthly idea why, and further investigation just clouds it further.
4. The Genuinely Spooky: Why does the ghost keep opening that closet door and printing old budget reports?

We gathered some stories within the 91Pro community and beyond to bring you a spooky smorgasbord just in time for Halloween.

The Meltdown

The most common of these is simply looking into the face of a tsunami, like when a worker from a large Oregon district logged on the first day of this school year to a Tier 1 ticket queue with 2,000 tickets. He also mentioned the time he experienced a 35% packet loss right before a meeting, requiring the dread phone call to the ISP.

Suspense stories (read: the things that NEVER should have worked, but somehow do) can also fall in this category, including the story of , told by .

This bucket also includes things that are physically dangerous; behold, the spicy pillow:

Didn’t know Apple now sells shampoo. (

The Infestations

Terrible but true:

It’s not just bed bugs, of course. Thankfully, we live in a relatively roach-free part of the country, but they pose major challenges to intrepid IT workers across the world.

Walt Oakhem, the owner of , told Gizmodo in August that

This does not mean we are completely spared. A well-placed source in a large suburban district in Oregon reports that rodents having taken over the empty desks of their department as everyone works from home.

And from a Washington district, who found themselves with way more ants than they knew what to do with: “We went to process some old Chromebooks for surplus (we scavenge screens and keyboards a lot for parts) at a middle school that got turned in and they were crawling … literally. Those units did not get put with the others.”

The Mystery

We turn now to a tale from Dr. Joe Morelock, the superintendent of Newberg School District, who was tech director for another school district when they started to see chunks of the building seem to go offline — only to reappear later in the day, by which point, it would be down in another place.

Students in certain areas of the building couldn’t connect to wifi, but the problem would spontaneously resolve itself after an hour or so.

“It was wild to have rolling blackouts throughout the building,” he said. “It took us a couple days to figure it out, because it wasn’t shutting everything down.”

They suspected (and were correct) that a student was doing it — but how?

“A kid had DHCP and DNS server on his laptop, and then probably used a secondary wireless card to trick other devices into connecting to his device,” Joe said. “So if anything was going through a DHCP renewal, or it was giving a stronger signal, it would attach to that device instead.”

The team was able to track down the culprit by comparing class schedules to the pattern of blackouts.

“It was very industrious of this young person and it was really hard to track down. It had our network manager on his toes for quite a while,” Joe said. “The random problems are the hardest to solve.”

Of course, end users can create enormous mysteries of their own. Mysteries like, how does this person successfully put on their pants in the morning?

On r/talesfromtechsupport, u/sr1030nx tells of the :

This story proves, once again, that a rudimentary amount of knowledge can be much more dangerous than no knowledge at all.

The Genuinely Scary

Tech can feel supernatural — it has immense power, surrounds us at all times, has the power to cause great harm and follow their own whims. There’s no shortage of dystopian tech horror in writing and film that evokes fear of a future uprising against us. Some experience this terror every time she sees footage of one of those Boston Robotics androids that can (ok, maybe not yet … but soon).

And then, there are the Ghosts of Auditors past. Witness now, our last story from HDESD CIO Rachel Wente Chaney!

Happy Halloween!

— Kelly Williams Brown

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Past Spotlight Posts

Tech in the Time of Wildfires: How the CIOs most affected by the September wildfires are dealing with yet another 2020 disruption

‘I don’t think we’ll return this year to in-person learning’: CIOs and IT share predictions on the coming school year

“It is in times of crisis when you most need innovation.” An 91Pro Q&A with CoSN CEO Keith Krueger

Six things they wish they’d known: Veteran CIOs talk about how to survive a budget cut, strategic communication and the advice they would give to their past selves

A New World of Student Privacy: With closures come countless questions on student privacy and compliance— but few answers

Remote Zoom panel: How school districts are adjusting to security and support needs during school closures.

“It’s never going to be the same”: Hardship, frustration, and the surprising opportunities found in K-12’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Dark web search engines, “zero-trust” models and your weakest link – Eight actionable cybersecurity practices your institution should follow according to Jack Maynard

Six employee communication tips from Know Your Team’s Claire Lew

Q&A: Tricia George on being named a Top 10 Innovative technology director

PSU CIO Kirk Kelly on how a department-wide overhaul landed them in the top 100 IT workplaces

Q&A: John Peplinski of Beaverton School District

Silverton kids get hands-on — and paid — with IT

How Salem-Keizer’s Bob Silva thwarted a $1.5-million phishing scam

Q&A: University of Oregon CISO Leo Howell

Newberg Superintendent Joe Morelock uses data to find invisible problems — and surprising solutions

The first sign came when the power started flickering on and off. The second was the smoke a few minutes later, creeping over the southern horizon. Then, two hours later, an urgent message from leadership.

“We were told by the superintendent, ‘you need to leave — things are not looking good,'” recalled Phoenix-Talent School District IT Manager Allan Quirós. “Basically, it was grab your phone, get your wallet and go home.”

It was Tuesday, Sept. 8, and Allan was at work in district offices with his team, preparing to launch distance learning the very next day. They knew that a fire had started that morning in Ashland, a few miles south, but had no idea of the devastation that laid ahead of them.

That afternoon, Allan said, instead of his usual 10-minute commute to Medford, it took 45 minutes.

“They closed 99 and I-5, so I was taking back roads — everyone was taking back roads,” he said. “It took some people hours to get home.”

That afternoon, the wildfire raged through both Phoenix and Talent, destroying thousands of buildings and in some places, leveling the towns. Allan evacuated for two days, coming home to an unscathed house but a district community with nearly unimaginable damage.

Miraculously, the school district didn’t lose any buildings, though the fire came within blocks.

That’s when Allan’s 12-hour days started. Within 48 hours, he said, he and his team, with help from Israel Mathewson at Southern Oregon ESD, had the district back up and running, using Orchard Hill Elementary School in the relatively unscathed Medford as their base of operations.

“The first thing we had to do was move equipment from the district office — computers, firewall, content filter — because we had to resume normal operations like finance and HR. Obviously, people were going to be calling the district and we had no power there.”

“Little by little, everything started coming online. By Thursday of that week, we got our network up via hotspot, and were using our cell phones for phone service. By Friday, we had basic operations, including our financial systems and SIS, up and running.”

Part of the quick turnaround, he said, was that they had opted to have their servers at SOESD, and were able to move their firewall and filter out there.

“We had to unlock a lot of things until they were useable but still secure,” he said. “That was an interesting balance to find.”

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Over at North Clackamas School District, Executive Director of Technology Derrick Brown, who assumed the job in July after the retirement of Tricia George, found himself with an entirely new set of problems.

As soon as they got word of the threat from the superintendent, all managers were asked to check in with their teams.

“It was like a wellness check — ‘Is anyone being evacuated? Do we have a staff for this week?'” he said. “At that point, there were no buildings or schools we were concerned about. That quickly changed by midweek.”

With a large number of staff either under evacuation or hosting evacuated family and friends, he said, they realized they couldn’t follow through with a planned Friday opening.

“Keeping staff, students and families safe became more the focus,” he said.

Despite that, they continued preparations to open, even if not on time.

“During this time, we continued to safely distribute Chromebooks and hotspots to families in need, but plans changed when air quality reached hazardous levels,” he said. “We moved from outside distribution to inside the school while social distancing; families continued to pick up equipment even as smoke and fire threatened our community.”

Soon, he said, his team began discussing every detail of how to execute on their emergency plans.

“When it got to Level Two in Milwaukie, we started doing infrastructure planning for four sites, asking ourselves when we would need to get in, what could we pull, what could we save and what we could salvage,” he said. “The focus turned to the growing threat to infrastructure, and what we could do to protect assets.”

Four buildings — three elementary schools and a middle school — at the east end of the district were in the danger zone.

While no students are in the classrooms, Derrick said, fires could destroy important equipment and threaten continuity of learning. Although the school district is redundant and backed up at Clackamas ESD, they knew that replacing equipment in the time of COVID would be difficult and slow.

A plan quickly emerged. Because they knew it could happen in the middle of the night, they opted against renting a vehicle.

“It would’ve been two guys in a truck, probably my network engineer and myself,” Derrick said. “We would’ve literally come in and ripped everything out securely, including network switches, basically everything in our data closet.”

His network engineer estimated they would need 15 hours total — the middle school would take four hours, with the elementaries taking around three hours, plus travel time.

“It was almost a fire drill, and a really good exercise for us — now, we’re beginning to look at that for all locations,” he said. “What is the most expensive item, what is the hardest to get, and what is the most critical?”

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Over at North Santiam School District, which contains the western part of Santiam Canyon as well as Stayton, Sublimity, Lyons and Mehama, Associate Superintendent/Director of Technology David Bolin reports that his job stayed much the same — though was now more urgent.

The entire district was at one point under evacuation orders, and school had to be delayed a week.

“There’s a large percentage of staff in Stayton and up in the canyon, so they didn’t have the ability to come to school,” he said.

Instead, they spent the week training the staff who weren’t displaced to be able to support their peers who couldn’t attend the training.

“We pulled together a core team to train, and they’ve stepped up and have helped teachers who were displaced by the fire get caught-up.”

Just to the east, Sam Proctor is the Technology Director at Santiam Canyon School District, whose students live in Mill City, Gates, Detroit, Idanha and the surrounding areas.

“We knew about the Opal Creek fire, but there was no alert,” Sam said. “On Labor Day, we had friends over playing cards, it was no big deal, and then a couple hours later it was Level 3, leave NOW.”

“There was absolutely zero notification that we needed to get equipment or stuff out of schools. But to be honest, we wouldn’t have thought about it, because the alert essentially said, ‘Get your family out of the area immediately.'”

The wildfire roared through the canyon, destroying hundreds of homes and buildings and leaving some of the small towns nearly leveled. It displaced a huge percentage of staff and students, though Sam’s house survived.

“It came within 200 yards of my house,” he said.

While the campus itself didn’t catch fire, all three buildings — the elementary school, junior/high school and district offices — sustained tremendous smoke damage both inside and outside.

“If you go to a desk and run your hand over it, it’s going to come off with an oily ash sort of thing,” Sam said. A recent report on KGW reports that there’s a $2.5 million cleaning bill, and the district is struggling to get insurance to pay up.

He added that the biggest losses were in staff and faculty homes.

“We had eight staff members who lost their houses, and we’d build whole home offices — keyboards, monitors, document cameras, headsets. We took a bigger loss there than with equipment on-site at the district. Luckily, we hadn’t yet handed out Chromebooks or devices to students.”

School began Sept. 30, with many students and teachers sitting on the school grounds to use the fiber-supplied WiFi, though Sam said he doesn’t yet know the full extent of the damage inside buildings.

“We could get into those new buildings and find a lot of electronics have been damaged. Our network is up, so we know no switches have failed because of ash damage. But we have a bunch of brand new projectors mounted, access points, intercoms — those are the three things I haven’t been able to check.”

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Despite all the hardships, all four directors report that there has been a silver lining — seeing the true value of their team, and how connected they are to the community.

Allan Quirós of Phoenix-Talent said the fire has changed him, and many throughout the district.

“There is more of a human connection now with what we do — it has really emphasized the fact that we’re here to help people,” he said. “Whereas normally there is so much division, right now the district and the community have come together, with everybody working toward the same goal. It’s great, and if I had to pick the people to work with on this, I’d choose these folks.”

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An 91Pro survey of dozens of CIOS, IT staff and teachers across the northwest reveals vast differences in timelines and attitudes, apprehension and the biggest concerns they face.

With nearly 70 respondents, the survey provides a wide-ranging view of the difference across states and institution sizes — but also the many, many points of agreement. It’s important to note that this isn’t a scientific survey; it’s a limited, voluntary sample. But despite that, the data paints a picture of a community very concerned about the challenges ahead of them, with some notable divides.

There is one point of total agreement: none of this is going to be easy. Districts are still facing the same difficulties they had when coronavirus began, with unequal broadband/device access and questions of equity.

As shown in the reopening timing predictions, many are pessimistic about the chances of returning to school as we know it this year, and now there are increased expectations from parents and the community that distance learning will be elevated from its spring iteration.

On top of that, the larger the institution was, the less likely respondents are to feel confident about scaling up across several arenas — support, staff training and student/parent preparation.

These concerns are layered atop the anxiety so many are experiencing right now — how do we stop the spread of the virus and keep everyone safe? If this is truly a new paradigm, how will we shape it? When will life go back to normal?

With pressure coming from all sides and lots of guidelines but little guidance, the educational technology community across the west is on edge as they approach a year that will look like none other.

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First, the who:

We had 68 individual respondents, spread across four states — Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, with the last two only accounting for 9% of responses, a tiny sample. Because of that, we’re not breaking out data by state.

We did, however, see many differences in opinion between those from small, medium or large institutions — more on that later.

We had responses from K-12, ESDs and higher ed, but because the second two categories are so much smaller than the first, we also will not be breaking them out when discussing results.

A quick note that some institutions had more than one respondent, and of course opinions are those of individuals.

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Question: When you open in the fall, do you expect your school will be fully open, on a hybrid model, or using comprehensive distance learning?

An overwhelming majority say back-to-school doesn’t involve going back to anywhere. Just under 1 in 4 — 23% — say their students will start with a hybrid or full in-person model.

The Responses

“I am extremely relieved we have made the decision to start school in virtual mode. My hope is we will remain virtual through the entire first semester.” — Large Oregon school district

“Anything but online is folly.” — Small Washington school district

“I really believe kids need to be in school. However, in today’s climate I think if the superintendent made that decision there are more people that would oppose it. I think there is too much hysteria about the whole thing. I think there is a lot of politics at work, and the superintendents are stuck with it.” — Small Washington school district

“So much depends on personalities (virus and human) and events (virus and human) beyond our control. It is hard to pin down what may change in the next six weeks. The *virus metrics* introduced by Gov. Brown for Oregon are helpful, in the sense that we now have some definition of what we’re looking for regarding “safe schools” … and, they still leave a lot of room for *human metrics* about what “safe schools” look like, so I’m simply investing in my district’s ability to stay as nimble as possible throughout the year ahead.” — Medium Oregon school district

“We are bringing into the building certain populations that are at risk, such as special education and English language learners.” — Medium Washington school district

“Should be remote learning only at this point in time. We have way too many parents with the ‘You can’t make my kids wear a mask’-attitude.” — Small Idaho school district

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Question: If you had to guess, when do you think your school will have students on-premises, whether that is a hybrid model or full opening?

Obviously there’s a range here, with 38% saying they expect to be on premises in some form during the fall, 41% predicting a return in the winter, and just over 1 in 5 predicting they won’t see a school door until spring or even this school year.

Breaking down the data further, we see a pronounced gap based on institution size:

Those from large schools have an interesting timeline: while very few are going directly back onto premises, 46% think they will be somewhat open by winter. We see the same with medium institution folks, half of which predict the same timeline. With smaller institutions, 48% say they will be back immediately or by the fall.

The Responses

“If I truly had to guess, not in my official capacity, I don’t think we’ll return this year to in-person learning.” — Large Oregon school district

“‘The virus makes the timeline’ — and also, wear a damn mask so we can move forward.” — Medium Oregon school district

“November 5th or the following week.” — Medium Washington school district

“I took a best guess on the question above, but think an option like, “I have no f*cking idea” is most appropriate.” — Medium Oregon school district

“Being small, we can manage cohorts easily, and may get to hybrid soon, if statistics allow.” — Small Oregon school district

“When we move to Hybrid we will have all K-2 students attending school onsite while 3-12 will be in a AA / BB schedule with fully remote learning on Wednesdays.” — Medium Washington school district

“As long as the virus continues to spread out of control, it will be difficult for schools to open to in-person learning without becoming places where the virus will spread fast. I have watched students lick door knobs like they are lollipops … herd immunity will need to happen one way or another before in-person education can realistically be done safely.” — Small Oregon school district

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Question: When do you think you’ll return to normal operations — all students and staff present on all days?

Here, we see some real agreement: 60 percent don’t think normal operations will resume this year. But if we break it down by size again, something startling pops out:

Every single respondent from a large institution, regardless of state, predicted there would be no returning to normal this year. We do see a strong trend here, with those from medium-sized institutions also pessimistic — 63% say the year is a wash. But among small schools, a majority do expect a return this school year. Even in that case, they don’t expect it to happen soon: only 16% expect to resume normal operations by November, while 23% predict a winter return and 19% are holding out hopes for the spring.

The Responses

“2021-2022 school year.” —Medium Washington school district

“Cohort isolation following a COVID diagnosis may deplete our sub pool and render in-person instruction impossible.” — Large Oregon school district

“Might not ever look ‘normal’ again.” — Small Oregon school district

“Million-dollar question.” — Medium Oregon school district

“As soon as we learn to wear masks in our community we will move this timeline up.” — Medium Washington school district

“My district has given the option of FULL-YEAR distance learning for 20-21. Therefore, I expect some students will not return this year, or ever.” — Small Washington school district

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Question: What do you perceive as the strongest factors guiding your institution’s reopening plans? Pick as many as apply.

A huge number of respondents say their schools are looking to state and local guidelines — 88%. Less than half are relying on CDC and federal guidelines (42%). Interestingly, we see that staff/faculty opinion holds a slight edge over parent and community opinion.

When we look by size, there’s broad consensus, with a plurality of all three groups listing state and local as the top factor. We do, however, see that the school board or board of trustees is far less likely to be important among large institution respondents (4.5 percent listed it) than those from medium or small institutions (12.9 and 14 percent, respectively). Additionally, those from large institutions are likelier than others to mention faculty and staff.

The ‘Other’ Factors

Eight respondents wrote in their own factors guiding reopening decisions:

• All of these played a role in our decision making
• State Metrics
• Health department guidelines
• Tribal Council
• Student Input
• Decisions based on emotion and not logic
• Union contracts and protections
• State is more restrictive than local health department

The Responses

“It would be a great day if I felt the need to type ‘Student opinion’ on the ‘Other’ line. I don’t. *sigh*.” — Medium Oregon school district

“Health and safety are at the core.” — Medium Oregon school district

“I think our district’s respect of parent, community, and staff opinions is so strong the district would not resume on-premise instruction if those groups felt it wasn’t safe to open, even if state and federal guidelines allowed or required on-premise instruction.” — Medium Oregon school district

“We have not been able to get answers from the state level on opening so the administration has had to create plans and tie them to state metrics without guidance.” — Medium Washington school district

“2 + 2 no longer equals 4.” — Small Oregon school district

“Liability moratorium desperately needed.” — Small Oregon school district

Question: How concerned are you about the following aspects of the coming school year?

Access to broadband, preventing the spread of virus inside school facilities and preparing students and families for comprehensive distance learning were three major points of concern — in each, a plurality of respondents gave the highest answer possible, “Very Concerned.” But the level of concern for various facets of the reopening does vary across institution sizes:

Here, we see that around 1-in-3 medium or small institution respondents are “very” concerned, while that number drops to 15% for larger institutions.

77% of those from large institutions say they are very or moderately concerned about technical support, while that number drops to 42% for medium institutions and 35% for small institutions.

Again, a big gap: 84% of respondents from large institutions are very or somewhat concerned, with a nearly 50% reporting they are very concerned. That number drops to 8% for medium institutions, and 10% for small.

Again, a huge difference across various sizes. This may speak to the scale issue we saw with the question of providing support from a distance.

The Responses

“To public opinion, it’s important. And, as those of us who have been around have observed and experienced, we often have 49.7% of our community upset with us no matter what decisions we make. For example, snow days … No win.” — Medium Oregon school district

“Distance learning is creating all kinds of labor management issues. Challenging puts it lightly.” — Medium Washington school district

“It is going to be very difficult to get students and families up to speed with distance learning without some face-to-face instruction on how it is going to work.” — Medium Washington school district

“Our district has many rural students with hotspots that don’t work for them, nor other internet available unless they travel. If parents are working, they need to walk on unsafe roads to get to the nearest WiFi.” — Small Oregon school district

“Parents are working and need schools for daycare; many kids are at home unsupervised, without help. Teachers aren’t getting training, we wasted the whole summer off-contract without preparation. Tech support not enough for family and evening help.” — Small Oregon school district

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Question: Any other thoughts you’d like to share on the coming school year?