Tony Perez’s experiences— from theater to Yahoo’s early years to his own business—have helped him see the fine print and the big picture, leading him to his calling: transforming how schools view technology and the role of technology leader. Access Points caught up with Perez to discuss his journey, passions, and insights, and how he’s making a difference at independent schools around the country.
Access Points: How did you find your way to a career in technology, specifically at independent schools?
Tony Perez: I have gone from working in professional theater to working for movie theater companies and running film festivals, to a horrible year in public relations. Then, I was fortunate enough to meet someone in the hall of my PR firm when I was really wanting to leave. I asked her what she was doing, and she said, “I’ve gone to work for this startup, and I have to open this office in a month, and I am going crazy. If you know anyone who wants to take a chance on a startup, let me know.” This was 1997. And I said, “Great. What’s the company?” And she went, “Yahoo.” I went, “Oh. OK.” I said, “Well, good to see you,” and I turned around, went back into my office, shut the door, and left a voicemail saying, “You know what? I’m that person.” It took about three months of just jumping through a bazillion hoops, and I ended up going to work for Yahoo in ’97, when it had just gone public.
But in 2001, all good things came to an end with the tech crash, and I went from being extremely busy to just having no work. I decided I would take a layoff. Yahoo paid for three months of counseling and career stuff. Finally, after I’d gone through it, I went and talked to the career counselor, and she said, “What are you thinking about doing?” And I said, “Well, you know, I think I’m going to start my own business.” She said, “Oh, that’s a terrible idea. All your testing shows you would be an awful, awful business owner.” And I went, “Oh. Really? I’m doing it anyway.”
I started my company, tech-KNOW-HOW, in Atlanta in 2001, and it was kind of like a pre-Geek Squad geek squad. This is in Atlanta. I ended up building a small company with seven people in it. We worked in Buckhead, which is a very high-end part of Atlanta, and people would pay us, you know, $125 to come and turn their computer on, essentially. “My computer won’t start.” “Well, [push the] power button.” And it got ridiculous, to the point where we weren’t really doing what I wanted to do with the company. In 2008 or so, I sold it. But starting around 2005–2006, when Myspace and Facebook were coming on scene, I began working with schools and talking to parent groups about “What is this social thing? What is Myspace? What is Facebook? Why are my kids always on it? Why won’t they show me their page?” I began working with a lot of the independent schools around me, talking about issues of privacy and how to manage their kids’ experience and try to reduce the fear that they had about something they had no idea about. And that led me to working directly with schools and talking to them about cyberbullying, cybersecurity, cyber citizenship.
At the same time, my daughter was transitioning to middle school, and she decided she wanted to go to the Atlanta Girls’ School, which was Atlanta’s first 1-to-1 laptop school, first wireless school in 2000 when they opened. They had a really imaginative and forward-thinking technology director, and I got really excited. My daughter enrolled and we were thrilled. In the middle of the summer, we got this email saying, “Our director of technology has left the school, but don’t worry. We’re performing a national search for new technology director.” I was so bummed. We were there two weeks before school started to pick up my daughter’s laptop, and they forced parents to go through this four-hour technology training. So, I’m sitting in this training, and the director of admission pulled up behind me and said, “Hey— you see we’re looking for a new director?” I’m like, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m not really very happy about it.” She goes, “Well, have you read the job description?” “Yeah. To me, it sounds like a dream job for somebody.” She said, “What about you?” And I went, “Oh. Really? Really? OK.” She said, “I think you’d be really good in that role.” Now, if I were smart, and I’d actually read those tests that I had done that Yahoo paid for and looked at what I was apt to do, education stood out like this screaming beacon: “You’d be good in education.” But I never saw that.
So, I became the director of technology at the Atlanta Girls’ School. Within three or four months, I was thinking, except for the theater work, I have wasted my entire life by not finding education until this point in my career.
During my time at the (Atlanta) Girls’ School, we brought in a learning management system (LMS) in 2010, kind of early. We found one that we absolutely adored—Haiku LMS—and I was totally blown away by the platform. It was student-centric, teacher-centric. It was creative. It allowed students to express their voice in an online platform in a way that wasn’t just “I’m turning in my homework.” Over a few years, I would go to the ISTE conference, talk to their founders, and say, “Look—if you ever have an opening for somebody, I’d be real interested in joining you.” As I was thinking of leaving the (Atlanta) Girls’ School, he called and said, “We are looking for an LMS evangelist. We like the way you think about what we do, and we would like you to come and join us in the Southeast—we’ve never done this before, so we’ll figure it out—and talk to schools that are interested in us about how to use an LMS.” At the end of that first year doing that, we were looking at where we are going next. I did a teacher-training session at The Children’s School (in Atlanta). They had this new young head, Nishant Mehta—brilliant, brilliant man. I went and saw him afterward, and he pitched me on joining his team. We talked a little bit about his ideas of breaking down the walls of the school and not becoming a “teaching and learning community” but becoming a learning community, where the entire community was engaged in learning, and doing that anywhere. And I went, “Man, we are aligned. Yes!” So, I joined them as their director of technology and left Haiku. Spent three years there, rolled out a 1-to-1 program. We really were able to turn that program around a bit and get a little more authentic use of devices happening. It was an incredible experience.
At the end of October 2018, we moved down here to Fernandina Beach on Amelia Island and set about trying to understand what am I going to do now? It began to occur to me that I could do most of the work that I was doing for the schools that I was physically in remotely, and really from a leadership perspective. Then, I found a little local school here on the island that I could go to and help them roll out—right at the beginning of the pandemic—a Chromebook program and Google apps and Workspace, and all in two months, which was crazy. At the same time, I began working with Educational Collaborators, an edtech consulting firm, which allowed me to begin serving several other schools in a variety of projects across the country, all remotely. So, my work has evolved by word of mouth into this place where I now serve as remote director of technology for several different schools.
Access Points: Now working with multiple schools, how are you leading that educational transformation?
Perez: Every school has a mission statement, right? How is your technology program supporting that mission statement? Always start with working with leadership to say, “When you bring in a technology leader, let’s understand that technology is one of the only, if not the only, thing that touches every single aspect of the school.” There was a time when technology helped run the school, but now technology really is the school in a lot of ways. It is the way people touch the school first, the way they communicate, and the way everybody learns. So, start thinking, “All right, we have a technology program. We don’t just have iPads in the classroom; we’ve got systems that support that. How do they all work together? And then the way that they all work together, combined with what we’re doing in the classroom, does that support our mission?” A lot of times people call out technology specifically, in either their strategic plan or in their mission statements, and say, “How are we doing that?” I think getting that awareness is important, and then going to teachers and, in some cases, like at University Lake, starting a technology committee among teachers. So, start a community of tech-focused teachers as learners, and say, “All right, we’re going to evaluate everything that we’re doing in the classroom. We have iPads; why are we using iPads?” We start there with “Let’s have a mission statement for technology use at the school based upon the way we teach”—and that’s the fascinating part, right? Because it’s different in Hartland, Wisconsin; than it is here in Fernandina Beach; than it is in Columbus, Ohio; or in Atlanta. That’s what I find fascinating. I want to know what teachers need to do their work. We used to say at the (Atlanta) Girls’ School, “What is your mission statement as an IT department?” And I’d say, “Well, it’s simple; it’s to remove all the barriers for teaching and learning.” This is kind of bleeding into where we think things are going to go, but more and more, it’s becoming the idea that maybe the IT department doesn’t serve schools very well or businesses very well. The idea that “I’ve got a problem, I can’t teach; I’m going to put in a support ticket.” That model just doesn’t work anymore. The whole idea behind the tech committee and a vision for technology is to begin identifying leaders in the teaching community that can become distributed areas of knowledge, so that we begin to decentralize the IT department, and not only say, “Now you’re someone who can help other teachers,” but empower them—other departments, too. If we begin to empower them to make decisions based upon parameters that are agreed upon by all and set by the team, set by the leader, and then they know how to get support when they need it, we become a much more streamlined and effective organization. One more thing that resonates with me really, really strongly: The tech leader is not sitting in the senior admin team to fix computers. They’re there to demonstrate and to show what’s possible with technology. That is the value. It’s to show at a high level across the entire organization what’s possible.
Access Points: Do you have any guiding principles you can share with other tech leaders?
Perez: Listen. Be comfortable getting out of your office and developing relationships throughout the school. Be curious. There’s so much incredible stuff. I surf Kickstarter all the time for things that might be applicable to my school. We’ve just found an $80 pocket 100x microscope that works with an iPad or an iPhone. It’s 3D printed, and it works with Bluetooth. Think about these underserved schools—you can buy 10 of those for what people are paying for three microscopes, and take them outside, and then airplay them to the TV. Ask questions. The big one is, don’t be afraid to fail, because we do. No one learns anything by not failing. Just remember, technology, it’s about people. In three to five years, everyone’s going to be in IT. When we give a laptop to a teacher, we can no longer say, “Here’s your laptop; if anything goes wrong, come see me.” What we need to do is say, “Here’s the tool that we’re giving you that is essential to your work in the school. We’re going to teach you how to use it, and we expect you to use it well.” Let’s give agency to the people that we work with, educate them and train them, and send them off to do their work. Also, network. Reach out and find mentors. My journey wasn’t made in a vacuum. People like Alex Inman, Michael Carson, Connie White, Vinny Vrotny, Jeff Morrison, and Bill Stites—to name way too few—all have mentored me and influenced my career.
Access Points: What motivates you outside of work? What do you do for fun?
Perez: I’m fortunate enough to live in a beautiful place. I love being outside, going to the ocean, bodysurfing, bodyboarding. My wife and I cook. We garden. She grows things that are beautiful; I like to grow things that you can eat. I love traveling, crazily enough, with my family. I have a 24-year-old senior at university, and she takes us into places we would never find on our own. It’s wonderful, and I’m so looking forward to getting back to traveling. I love just learning about all sorts of things. And cycling. If my wife, Sally, reads this and goes, “You didn’t talk about bikes,” she’ll say I was totally inauthentic or that I purposely kept it out.
Get to Know Tony Perez
HOMETOWN: Jacksonville, Florida
EDUCATION: BFA, University of Georgia (“National Champions—Go, Dawgs”); MFA, Florida State University/Asolo Conservatory of Professional Actor Training
HOBBIES: “Cycling, traveling, gardening, and cooking—I belong to the cult of the Big Green Egg. Also, anything having to do with the ocean.”
FAVORITE BOOK, TV SHOW, FILM, OR FAMOUS QUOTE: Books: Born a Crime and The Silmarillion | TV shows: The Wire and SNL | Film: The Last Dragon
FUN FACT: “In my early college years, I worked at a theme park with roving characters. When I started, they made me go out as Honey Bunny [Bugs Bunny’s girlfriend], with a gingham dress, big pinafore underneath, and bloomers. They did it as a hazing ritual, but I liked it so much, I performed the character all the time.”