A reflection on my six goals of the 2019-2020 school year:
complete and occupy The Hub; advance diversity, equity, and inclusion work; design high quality parent education—continue leading parent conversations around technology and students; complete the CAIS Accreditation Self-Study; upgrade and fine tune Hillbrook’s technology infrastructure; and, as Safety Coordinator, work with Margaret to complete and implement recommendations from security audit.
The last day we were all campus was March 11, 2020. I’ve often heard the school leadership phrase, “There’s the day you think you’re going to have, and then there’s the day you actually have.” Well, with our campus shut down for the last three months of school due to COVID-19, this feels more like…. there’s the year you think you’re going to have, and then there’s the year you actually have. So with that, let’s take a look at my six goals for the 2019-2020 school year as Director of Technology.
Complete The Hub
The last day we were all campus was March 11, 2020. I’ve often heard the school leadership phrase, “There’s the day you think you’re going to have, and then there’s the day you actually have.” Well, with our campus shut down for the last three months of school due to COVID-19, this feels more like…. there’s the year you think you’re going to have, and then there’s the year you actually have. So with that, let’s take a look at my six goals for the 2019-2020 school year as Director of Technology.
As of mid-June 2020, we are so close to completing this project. The shutdown of our campus, including all construction personnel, led to significant delays in the completion of The Hub. Before the global pandemic, we were even beginning to give tours of the new spaces. We remain hopeful that this summer will bring a completed Hub project. As we open the space, we are digging deep into the work of planning for a socially distanced, as well as remote, learning experience for students in the fall. Amidst that, we continue to transition programs and people into the new space, and celebrate the opening as we share the inspiring educational vision for the space.
Advance diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
We began our DEI Protocol Groups in October 2019. I was excited to have a dedicated time and space to do the work of DEI as part of the Hillbrook community. Back in August 2019, I spoke at length with Gulliver about how I might name DEI as a goal, and how I might make progress on this goal. A number of systems we have in place immediately came to mind: hiring and recruiting, as well as participating in protocol groups.
Gully and I submitted three presentation proposals around the intersection of DEI and ed tech–one submission to the NAIS Annual Conference (not accepted), one submission to the ISTE 2020 Conference around accessibility and equity, and one submission to the ISTE 2021 Conference focused on the social media shift in ed tech as it quickly integrates DEI work into ed tech work (waiting to hear back).
I have done quite a bit of reading, watching and listening to better understand how I can advance diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Here are some highlights. This school year, I read White Fragility, Blind Spot, and How to Be an Antiracist. I watched several movies around white privilege and systems of racism: Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea, The Uncomfortable Truth, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, and rewatched 13th (2016 documentary).
Additionally, I’ve been creating podcasts around all my professional goals, with a deeper dive into my own DEI work. Gully joined us on the Hillbrook CTE podcast, as well as the ReMarks & Reflections podcast to share DEI work at Hillbrook. Gully has also been a great resources as I plan out upcoming podcast episodes.
An absolute highlight of podcasting this year was having Gyasi Ross on the Hillbrook CTE podcast. Gyasi joined a variety of classes at Hillbrook in January, and was a guest speaker for all MS students during Reach Beyond Block, talking of “privilege & bias.” Gyasi is a nationally recognized Native American rights advocate and DEI speaker who has been on national TV, a keynote speaker at the People of Color Conference, and has worked with independent schools throughout the country on justice and equity topics.
Design high quality parent education
The last day we were all campus was March 11, 2020. I’ve often heard the school leadership phrase, “There’s the day you think you’re going to have, and then there’s the day you actually have.” Well, with our campus shut down for the last three months of school due to COVID-19, this feels more like…. there’s the year you think you’re going to have, and then there’s the year you actually have. So with that, let’s take a look at my six goals for the 2019-2020 school year as Director of Technology.
I learned two things about parent ed this year. First, I learned that meeting in small groups informally is absolutely a great way to connect. Too often, I overthought this goal and needed everything to be just right in order to host an event. Meeting in small groups over coffee or peeking into the Hub construction site led to many fruitful conversations, and built rapport with parents that were excited about technology. The second thing I learned (relearned?) is that these events can be simple. Each time, I wanted to plan a perfect event with perfect questions at the perfect place. I’m not sure why, but I kept reverting back to this mindset instead of just planning regular meetups for parents to connect and talk about learning and talk about technology. Despite only meeting formally twice this year and several other times with smaller groups, I found that this group of parents were so important to have as we transitioned to remote learning. Many times, I reached out to members of these groups to check in, ask questions about platforms, and learn about other ways we could structure both remote learning and tech support remotely.
CAIS self study
We successfully completed the CAIS accreditation process! Our senior leadership team shared “that the school passed with flying colors,” though we won’t receive official accreditation until later this year. During the ending presentation from the committee, I was proud to hear that the security of our campus was named “highly effective.” The committee shared a recommendation to continue working with Joffe Security, the company that ran our safety audit. Throughout this pandemic, we continue to use Joffe Security as a resource for protocols and safety recommendations.
Four items were shared in their presentation that I wanted to name here. Chef Junior was interviewed, during our accreditation, and his sense of ownership and of our school community was profound. Felix spoke of the culture of the school; the visiting team noted that Maintenance Staff rarely can name the mission, vision, or culture of a school community, and they were awed with our facilities team. They shared a story of how an art teacher pushed a student further on a drawing of a cloud… sharing the teacher’s reflection of the student’s work: “Her internal sense of completion is premature.” Finally, they shared the work that Junior Kindergarten is doing around change makers.
Safety Coordinator
This was my first year as Safety Director at Hillbrook. Most notably, this role is responsible for fire drills. Before campus closure, we held regularly scheduled monthly fire drills. We relocated supplies for search and rescue to expedite their work. I updated the Emergency flow chart (part of the Emergency Preparedness Handbook) to bring clarity to existing roles. FInally, I created printed checklists for search and rescue, for student attendance, for lower school faculty attendance, and for middle school faculty attendance to better organize and account for managing people on campus.
We implemented VisitU this year for visitors to check in and receive a printed badge. A huge benefit to using a digital check-in system was the ability to view on-campus guests from any device (that has login credentials), making identifying guests during an emergency a much simpler and reliable process. For the fall, we will be implementing new features in light of COVID-19: touch-free check in, wellness screening, capacity management, and contact tracing for guests. We will also explore using VisitU for employees for midday check-outs to better track on- and off-campus locations.
A significant project this year was to work with Margaret to complete and implement recommendations from a security audit. We worked with Joffe Security to run an audit. They gave us a seven page assessment summary, as well as a spreadsheet with nine pages/sheets of items assessed. Margaret and I met with Jessica from Joffe several times, and then continued to work together to create action steps for all 190 items. Even before our campus closed due to COVID-19, we made significant progress on many of the suggestions. We continue to have a clear path forward to making our campus more secure, and believe we have a strong partnership with Joffe Security as we move towards socially distanced learning this coming year.
Upgrade and fine tune Hillbrook’s technology infrastructure
It’s challenging to recall the typical bustle of activity in the Tech Office back when students were on campus. Much of my memory of the past year was transitioning to remote learning, even though we accomplished many things before then.
We applied and were granted E-Rate Category 2 funding. This will give us the ability to upgrade network wiring in older buildings over the next two years, and receive discounted hardware and labor. We conducted a formal wireless survey to manually tune each of our 44 wireless access points. A consistent wifi experience for users continues to be challenging–as we tune and upgrade our network, more and more devices are on campus and those devices are using more and more bandwidth. We continue to have a robust infrastructure, but I know that we will continue to need to work on it.
To that end, I worked with Aaron from Novani to develop a purchase cycle for network switches to keep them upgraded while spreading the cost out over several years. In addition to on-campus network security, we are in the process of adding Cisco Umbrella, a service that gives us the ability to filter content off-campus. This will give off-campus/remote students the same level of protection with web content that they would receive on campus. Finally, we negotiated our Comcast contract. Over the last couple years, our bandwidth has increased from 70 mb/s to 500 mb/s and our monthly cost has been cut in half.
The end of year six
I ended my year-end reflection in 2019 reflecting on the fact that there is often the day we think we’re going to have, and then there’s the day we actually have. It seems that 2020 left us with the year we thought we were going to have, and then the year we actually had. I remain incredibly proud of all of our faculty, our staff, our students, and especially our Tech Team for supporting an unprecedented shift to remote learning over just a few days. It speaks to the caliber of faculty we have, and also illustrates how capable we are with meaningful tech integration. While colleagues at other schools were struggling to find enough devices for students, we were able to use our existing one-to-one infrastructure, as well as our already-established learning platforms to continue the learning even while our campus closed. As we look ahead to an uncertain future in August, I remain confident that we will be able to be an example of how students can learn on-campus or off-campus in the coming year.
