Large School Leadership Network Quarterly Meetup

Today our topic, and these are informal.

We can discuss whatever you want, but our topic that we had allotted for this month was looking at the department hierarchy, the structure, and the evolving roles, in particular with large schools.

So I've got some stuff for you.

The first one is this.

I'm going to share a link in the chat.

If you have a hierarchy, it can be just your department, it can be where you fall in the whole overarching things, but I'd love to see your team in particular, what that looks like.

If you guys are able to share those, and again, you're comfortable sharing with the group, I think it would be good for us to just see how different groups are structured.

Sometimes we'll involve things like registrar, and sometimes it's library and where are the parameters around your department? And then other things that, just so you'll kind of get the agenda for the day, I think it would be interesting for us to add job descriptions as resources on the large school community board.

So I'll drop a link for that, too.

But especially if you've updated a position recently, you have some new tweaks in there, if we could share that language together, or if you have completely new roles that you're hiring for, I want to talk about those, too.

And again, anything that you came here today, we can discuss those as well.

But I know you guys are-- I'm giving you homework.

You're trying to find those sample things, but I'm also opening up the floor, so take it away.

Does anybody want to share about their department, about any evolving roles or anything else that's on your mind today you want to present to the group? Can I share my screen? Ooh, yes.

Let me go ahead and change permissions for everyone.

One moment, please.

I say that because I don't have this in a format that's easy to just give a link.

Yeah.

All good.

But I'm happy to just share it.

Yeah, thank you.

All right.

Oh, Zoom.

They've changed their settings.

Just a second.

Tell you what, I'm going to quickly make you co-host, and then I'll go back and hunt for the new- Yes.

I have the power ...

all of the power.

All the power.

Y'all, I don't know if this is a good idea.

We'll see.

Oh, I will use this in ways that no one will-- No, I think I'll be good.

All right.

Here you go, Jonathan.

We had some other people trickling in.

Hey, guys.

Welcome.

Jonathan's about to share about some department hierarchy.

So Jonathan, take it away.

So here is my departmental structure.

And the timing of this is really good because I just got permission to hire another person, which I can explain in a minute.

But this, I assume everyone can see it.

I see some faces, I see a thumbs up.

So this is from a redesign that we did two plus years ago.

I used to be, at one point, the director of technology, and everyone was flat below me.

I had, I think, 14 direct reports at that time.

And I realized that in order to do my job well, I had to have fewer direct reports so I could do more work and not just be having check-in meetings all day, every day.

So I lobbied for and got the CITO, we call me the Cheeto, title, and I made these associate directors.

They are actually all turning into directors next year on July 1.

And you can see that I have a two-campus school.

We're at 1,300 students in total.

So because we have two campuses, there's some overlap in how this works.

So like this guy, who's actually now a different person, but the block is still there.

We're showing an older version of this.

He's at our lower school, and these three are at our middle upper school.

This is now an MSP.

I should actually just update this, but I'm showing you the old one.

But you know what? Hold on.

I have a better one to show you.

This is actually going to be fully accurate.

Give me one second.

While you're pulling that up, I have comments.

I love that you have a whole data governance breakout in your hierarchy.

Oh, yeah.

That's amazing.

That's the reason I'm actually going to reshare is because it's bigger than it looks.

So let me just go to that one.

All right.

So this, we have a document called Know Your Tech Department.

It has all of our faces and little bios so people can know who we are.

But this is the actual, the current diagram.

It looks very similar except we have an MSP in a role here, and we have a new person in the role here.

So one of the things that I felt very successful at was getting the data governance part to become formalized and then be organized below my reporting line.

And so Jen is the person who some of you may know.

She worked for me.

I know Vinnie knows her.

But she worked for me years ago, was a head of technology at a few places and kind of wanted to come back.

So we hired her on as the associate director of administrative systems.

And she has a group that includes the registrar, that's Nicole.

Amaryllis is the person who does all of our medical data, because our nurses are good nurses, but not always so good at the record keeping part.

So she does a lot of that work.

And Francis is our attendance officer who does both adult and student attendance on both campuses.

Well, one campus for the most part.

So that's kind of the structure.

We have this lower school component, and so we have Anne Marie and Sammy.

They basically do the ed tech at the lower school, plus some other things.

And that's what it looks like today.

And the thing I'm actually most curious to hear people's opinions are is I've been lobbying for, and was rather surprised to suddenly be told, that I could hire a full-time programmerBecause I have a lot of things I want to do, and I am a programmer, and I do not have time to do all of the things that I want to do for Riverdale.

And I'm both nervous about getting into custom software development, but I've been doing it for a long time anyway.

So I'm actually excited for the notion that someone can do it better than I have been doing it, produce better products, and hopefully maintain them.

That's my biggest fear is what happens when that person leaves.

How do you weather that storm? How do you hire that person? Where do you source a programmer for a school? That's different than the positions I've hired for in general.

And so anyway, that's our structure.

I know that I'm large compared to many schools.

I feel very fortunate that we've been able to get a lot of resources to support the school, and one more coming.

So I can stop sharing.

Jonathan, this is beautiful.

We're structured similarly, although our data governance is currently our data and institutional research.

I may borrow that governance piece, and borrow.

The question that I have is your AI efforts, does that fall onto this particular chart- It does ...

and/or is it fall into another bucket? So there was a person on there under Hill Academic Technology who actually has a new title this year.

He's our associate director of academic AI.

And he is responsible for bringing AI to our middle and upper school educational experience, like the academic side.

I do the operational AI, essentially.

And at the lower school, we have less AI, but we have two people down there who don't have it in their title, but they're the ones who are working with teachers, and working on educational AI.

Thank you.

From what I understand, there are very few schools that actually have a job that has AI in the title.

And we were pretty excited to try to make some space for that to happen and to acknowledge its moment right now.

And I assume that someday we won't have that title because it'll be everywhere.

You don't need a person whose job it is to do that thing, but I think we have that for a fair few years.

Anyone have any advice for me on where I hire a programmer? I have a job description that I've been tweaking, but I don't know where to send it.

I would hire Claude.

Well, my intention actually is the only reason I'm doing this is because things like Claude exist.

Yeah.

We now have, I think, the resources available to us where I can spend 500 bucks a month on tokens for someone, and they can produce real, actionable, helpful things that will improve the experience of our community.

And I write, as I said before, I'm a programmer.

I have written tens of thousands of lines of code for things.

Oh, should I admit people now that I'm the co-host? It's very exciting.

I got you.

I got you.

You can reject them.

You have all the power.

Yeah.

You're out.

Get out of here.

All that.

So Jonathan, have you looked at your community college or two-year programs- So- ...

to potentially hire, especially if you're going to be paying for tokens alongside? I have considered that, and I feel conflicted because part of me wants a person who has enough experience as a programmer to be able to create big things.

And I have a list of big things.

I will flash it up on the screen, but I don't want anyone to steal it.

So here, let me just...

I'll show you what I think of as our, quote, "big things." And I don't want to monopolize this, so please, I'm happy just to shut up at some point.

So these are the, quote, "big things." I have built this already, but it needs to live somewhere else and be done differently for some of these things.

And I have built a 10,000-line app script that lives in a Google spreadsheet that does an amazing job of analyzing everyone's Google Drive and telling you what to do with it, but it's not sustainable.

It needs to be different.

And so we have, this is one of our biggest things right now, is we've been building a chatbot that has full access to all of our institutional data, that understands who you are and what you should be able to see and gives you good answers to questions.

That is a big asterisk on the good.

We're working on that part right now.

And I don't have time to do all the things well and run a productive department, so I need to get them out.

Anyway, so all that is to say, I'm a little nervous about getting someone who's straight out of school who hasn't really done big things yet, even though I want AI to do a lot of the work with them.

So I'm not quite sure how to approach that.

Is it a full-time role, Jonathan? It's full time, and I'm conflicted about whether it should be on-prem, if it can be remote, or it can be a hybrid.

I like people who-- Not I like people.

I like it when people are physically present.

I think it helps the cultural component of what we do, and understanding teachers and sitting down with them and seeing what their pain points are.

But I also recognize it might be easier to mechanically hire someone who is remote.

I noticed that you had- I think it's...

Oh, sorry.

Oh, go ahead.

I noticed you had data warehouse, building out a data warehouse on there.

It's something that we've been talking about as well, and having someone in person who could meet with and understand the community and what the needs are around that seems like it would be an advantage.

Yeah.

I put a big question mark on data warehouse because I've spent five years assembling all of the pieces so I could create a data warehouse.

We tried School BI for a while.

It didn't quite work out for us.

I built my own little things in BigQuery, butI don't know that I need it anymore.

Mm.

There's such an evolution right now of what AI can do and how you can reach via APIs into other systems, that I don't know that I need to have everything centralized.

So I'm not quite sure how I want to handle that.

I feel on the fence.

That's why there's a question mark, and it's kind of at the bottom.

Do you feel like you have a pretty connected ecosystem currently without- We- ...

the warehouse? We do.

I didn't really give any background on myself, but this is my 22nd year at Riverdale.

And so I have built the thing that I think is very pretty, and shiny, and beautiful, and all of our data sees daylight, people review it.

It's like we've done a good job of making sure we have clean data that is accessible, which is why I feel like maybe the warehouse isn't so necessary now, whereas five years ago, I felt somewhat desperate to have it.

We're Veracross customers.

They're going to give us VC Studio, which is going to help to analyze your data.

We have lots of things now that we didn't have before.

I ask because I'm currently on a team of developers, and one of the big projects is a Fabric lakehouse- Yeah ...

that we're currently building out.

That's right But there are lots of different systems and different places, and- Yeah ...

data coming from everywhere that we're trying to coalesce and be able to report around comprehensively.

Where do you work? Phillips Academy.

Okay.

That's cool.

I want to hear more about that at some point.

Because that's exciting.

Yeah, I was pretty excited.

I've only been here for two months at this point, but yeah.

Very exciting stuff.

Hey, Lauren, I'm just saying- Yeah ...

you got an open platform if you want to do a- ...

webinar, magazine, podcast.

Just saying.

So whenever you're ready to share, you just email me, and we will give you a spotlight.

Yes.

We're currently very much in the building phase, but I would love to, obviously with the support of my supervisors, have something to share maybe next year.

So maybe you know where I can hire a programmer? I am, understandably, the newest hire in my department.

Several of my colleagues have been here for 10, 20-plus years.

If you can find somebody that's been in higher ed, I think they have a much greater need and usage- Mm-hmm ...

of developers.

That's why I was asking, partly, if it was full time, if it was more full time, maybe it would be somebody that was looking to step back a little bit, or even just changing environments might- Yeah ...

potentially get you the experience, but somebody who's looking for something a little less intensive.

Got it.

But where do you advertise for those people? I don't know where a developer who works at some college is hanging out looking for jobs.

We put a thing on Indeed, I'm sure we've all been there, where you get a flood of applications that don't meet any of your expectations.

In fact, more often than not, I end up with applications of programmers to jobs that are not programming jobs.

So I kind of feel like maybe this'll be the first time that it actually really helps me, that I end up with a million programmers looking for a job that actually is about programming.

Higher ed jobs.

Thank you, Ashley.

And you're a Google environment, right? Yeah.

I'm wondering if there's any sort of architecture around that, that you could take advantage of.

Well, we do want to stay in the Google ecosystem wherever possible, so it just keeps things tight.

Or I just mean in terms of a user group or some place that you could advertise- Oh ...

the position.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I'm dropping more links.

Educause is another one.

They do higher ed tech.

I got a couple of things for you, and again, just maybe check them out.

Okay.

Thank you.

I guess one thing I'm wondering, too, I know I've had conversations with Nick Martese and a few other folks from here that I think there's a lot of common development interests across the independent schools, and so even just collaborative open source projects.

Again, hiring somebody to do it dedicated sounds amazing, but I do think as a community, we have a lot of technical talent, and there's an opportunity for collaboration and projects that might benefit more than one school, where we could even build projects with multiple branches for different things.

But I would be personally interested in discussing those kinds of ideas at some point.

Cool.

Every time I've tried to get schools together to do something together collaboratively- Yeah ...

you think we're like this, and then you slowly...

Oh, sorry.

Slowly, we drift apart in our requirements, and then suddenly you're like, "This doesn't work anymore." Yeah.

I get that.

Yeah.

But I always have that hope.

I'm in New York City.

I know most of the other tech people, at least the tech directors in New York City.

We talk all the time, and then we're like, "Yeah, we're not working together on that." Like, "That's not going to work.

You want this, and I want this," and they're actually not as closely aligned as we thought they were at the beginning.

But I love the idea.

Yeah.

Jonathan, we recently hired someone that had some programming and tech skill.

I'll put the link to the job description in the chat, and we just honestly advertised it with Indeed and whatever, and posted it on the site, and it did net us someone that has some programming background, did that professionally, was in that career for some time, but he'd actually unfortunately gotten laid off from the software development firm that he was at, but wanted to make a move into education.

So he's had that interest, that was a key marker of the jack-of-all-trades necessity of anyone working in a school, I think.

He's out at the moment helping a student with a Google problem, it looks like.

Yeah.

So he's willing to dive in and scrub in on all that kind of stuff, but also can do the programming project stuff that-- We're still early days, but I'm trying to make a key distinction between someone that can do it professionally versus someone that kind of does it as a hobby.

Right.

Because I think when we actually get to the system critical type things, it has to be done professionally, right? Right.

Yeah.

You don't want someone who's like, "Yeah, I didn't really think about security on that data.

Gosh." Yeah.

"Sorry." Which I think is the-- There was a story somewhere about people vibe coding up solutions to their problems in their own professional worlds, and I've had that situation come in a couple times.

Just walk in, a teacher or someone say, "Hey, I've got this random problem with something, and I vibe coded up a solution.

Can you put this out on-- Where can we host this?" And I'm like, "Whoa." Yeah.

Slow down, people.

Yeah.

We got to do some evaluation, et cetera.

But somebody was like, "I need access to the Google, everyone's calendar in Google to make this work." And I was like yikes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you for the therapy session, everybody.

All right.

So others, do you want to just share your screen for a second? Do you have a visual for us, and you could walk us through your department challenges, opportunities, recent hires, things you're searching for that you want to get feedback on from the group? Who's up next? If you don't mind, I can share.

I do have to drop hard at 2:30, so if I'm going to do it, I guess now's the time.

Let me see if I can find the screen here.

Okay.

Let me share a whole desktop.

We'll see how this works.

If this is an issue from a resolution, let me know.

Does that look okay for you all? Okay.

Yeah.

So this is pulled from a couple slides, and it's slightly dated, but it gives the general idea.

So, our department is very loosely coupled, and so when I think of the tech team at our school, there's really sort of tech ops, if you will, or back-end systems administration, or tech help, things of that nature.

We have our tech integration team, which is when we don't have dedicated curriculum time, how we can take our department and go inject ourselves into traditional core classes, core curriculum, and help elevate with project-based learning by bringing technology to the table and supporting.

And then we have technology-specific teachers, which is kind of a blend of not only the tech integration team, but also then maybe our computer science department, which is maybe the most loosely coupled because they're typically reporting through divisional leadership, but also have a seat at the table, and we try to collaborate closely with them.

So when I think of our tech department at our school, it really is kind of the blend.

I also just really like Venn diagrams, but that's us.

And then so recently, our CFO for 30-plus years retired, moved up to Minnesota, and we hired a new CFO that now myself, the director of security, director of facilities, and director of special programs all report under.

And so that kind of operating officer piece is now a part of that.

And so it's been a nice change because we're able to get together as a group and kind of talk operations, which was happening already, but was more informal by necessity, and now is maybe more intentional and thoughtful.

And then the more direct reports without the divisional leadership.

Again, I have a single assistant director of technology who's responsible for kind of our network.

We don't have a managed service provider or any of that, so everything's in-house, and so we really drive that through our assistant director of technology, and then we have one tech admin who kind of runs around campus.

So we're three-year-old through 12th grade, around 1,200 students, just under 1,200 students here.

And then we have a bigger focus on Our makerspace teams and tech integration teams.

And so during the school year, this part-time position is now full-time.

So we have three full-time tech integration during the school year, and then one of them is actually a staffer, a 12-month employee, who over summer comes back to the backend systems to help us with our one-to-one iPad program, device refresh, things of that nature.

And I'm working to shift this into a director of technology operations, a director of education technology, so that it's a little more intentional and aligned with what I'm seeing in other schools.

And then we're also looking at potentially hiring a part-time technology role.

I'm still defining exactly what it is, but similar to Jonathan, I feel like at times I'm a little too thin to be great at anything.

And so I'd like to be more intentional with where I spend my time and help bring someone in that can maybe help us leverage our...

We're a Blackbaud school, Google school.

We're trying to bring athletics to the table and doing more with our platform and working closer with enrollment management and there's just so many things where if we had somebody that could go sit down and spend the time and partner with these departments, I think we could elevate what we're doing.

So yeah.

I didn't really have any questions, but I'm welcome to any feedback or anything else, so.

You said you report to the CFO now.

Who did you report to before? The assistant to the head of school for academic affairs.

And he's retiring.

They're restructuring some of that leadership team.

So I'm a part of the administrative team currently.

And then I've always reported to somebody on the leadership team, and then I meet with the head of school probably on a monthly cadence or as needed anyway.

But, so certainly plenty of availability just from an organizational structure under the CFO.

Hmm.

I used to report to the head of school, and then when he left and a new one came in, she was like, "I don't want 16 people reporting to me," which I thought was a reasonable thing.

And I got reorged under the, well, not really a CFO, but kind of CFO.

Basically, a chief of operations.

And now that's getting shifted again next month, so we'll see what that looks like.

But I do...

The same thing that happened to you happened to us where it's like we brought technology and facilities and security all under one person, and kind of legitimized the fact that we actually need to sit in a room together every month and coordinate and make sure everything's going smoothly, and that has been a nice change.

Yeah.

We've become...

Things that have traditionally been in facilities have, over the last three years, heavily migrated into our space.

Everything from doing copier RFPs to managing the phone systems entirely to in the security world.

We've migrated and helped support integration with our badge reader platform, so accounts are integrated to Google, and one account ties to everything, and- Mm ...

helping manage.

We had a third party managing a separate subnet on our network just for the security cameras, and now we've taken over managing the full network just to avoid some of the confusion that was happening.

So a lot more has fallen to an RACI diagram, I guess, or somewhere more involved than we used to be, so.

Well, thanks.

I'll stop sharing.

But yeah, I apologize, I do have to drop here, but good to see everybody.

Thanks, Brent.

Good to see you.

Okay.

All right, y'all.

Who's up next? I already went.

I'm kind of half fleshing out this flowchart, which is making no sense as I try to like...

Which I think is part of the challenge if we're going to do a therapy session as well for my world.

This is a safe space, right? So actually, the broad challenge that I'm interested to hear if anyone has any thoughts on is we, at one time, the sum total of technology people at the school was probably twice what it is now, and- Wow ...

most of the ed tech, there was a director of academic technology, and divisional tech coordinators kind of traditionally.

But those have kind of been moved into other areas, and so now I'm looking at proposing a new position in our middle school to start that would focus on digital skills, computer science electives, some maker space opportunities.

So a bit of a hybrid, but right now I don't really have anyone that's dedicated on the academic technology side.

So I'm wondering if anyone kind of almost like a pendulum swing and has swung back or worked on bringing back more folks on that academic side and has any experience or stories to share on that front.

I've been pretty stable with the number of people.

I don't call them ed techs or integrators.

We call them academic technology specialists.

Mm-hmm.

I'm weird about my titles, but I don't like the word integrator.

I don't know why.

It somehow doesn't quite fit for me.

Mm-hmm.

And I never feel like I have enough, and I always feel like I have too many.

And it's this kind of weird thing where people want more support than we can reasonably give them.

And what I really want is people to not need the support.

And so we're trying to train people all the time in order for them to not need us.

Mm-hmm.

And things keep developing, and we keep needing-- They want more.

People want to go further than what they've done, and that's, I guess, the reason I have people doing that role.

I don't feel like I have enough.

I recognize I have a pretty large team compared to my number of students, but I have two people serving 864 students and 150-ish faculty on one campus.

And they could use a third easily.

And I can make that argument.

If the school was willing to spend more money, I would get that person, like, tomorrow.

So just for context too, for everyone, we are a school of, next year, approximately 1,300 people, 1,300 students.

And besides myself as tech director, we have four other people in the department.

So, a tech support helpdesk kind of frontline support, education systems integrator.

Although, Jonathan, I'll see if I can come up with a new word for that.

That's sort of the programming now.

You do you.

Yeah.

And a network and systems admin, and then our registrar, who's our sort of chief Veracross person on the academic side, reports to me as well, somewhat historically, because I was the original Veracross sort of person at a time here.

But yeah, we're just, I think, both on the things we'd like to do on the operational and infrastructure side, feeling bandwidth problems there, but then no direct influence on the academic side of things right now.

I think it's so hard to look at other schools and be like, "They have enough people," or, "They have more or less," because it really depends on what you're doing with technology.

And also, the big thing that I keep working on is building up capacity in other departments.

Like if I have someone in our admission office right now that is phenomenal and really has all of their systems running so smoothly, is amazing with data, has her fingers in all of these other different systems, and she is leaving.

And so really having to think about how we're going to restructure.

But as much as we can build up the capacity, the technical capacity in other departments really changes the needs of the, quote-unquote, "tech department." Do you have issues with people who aren't very good at what they're supposed to do, and then the school hires around them to get them help to do the things that they can't do, versus helping that person do better or exiting them? Because we fight with that a lot here.

We do.

In safe space, we also have a tendency to hire people from within, who then it becomes, "But the tech people will help you and train you how to do everything that you need to know how to do." And then two years later, they leave, and we're training another person, and- Mm-hmm ...

it's a drain.

Yeah.

I fight really hard to be in the hiring committees so that I can try to get someone that I think is trainable.

And sometimes we're in those, and it's successful.

Sometimes we're in those, and we still pick someone who we have a hard time with.

Sometimes you get amazing people who are just phenomenal, like the person you're talking about who's leaving.

You're like, "Oh, you're so good.

So good.

Don't go." Yes.

"Don't go." Yeah.

And sometimes I've been on the hiring committees, and the candidates were just not there.

That's a problem as well.

Well, I can share my chart.

I was just furiously taking people's names out.

So- I left all my names in.

So I would not...

Let's see.

There we go.

So, I kind of think of the Venn diagram of the ed tech side versus the IT support side.

We do have a director of IT that reports to me as the CTO, and we also have a network admin and webmaster.

The three of them have been here for so many years.

They kind of work together, but officially the director of IT, they report to him.

And then underneath them, we also have, because St.

Stephen's and St.

Agnes is three campuses within a five-mile radius, we have about 1,300 students.

So, we have a tech support person on each campus.

And then on the educational side, we have a computer science department chair normally.

I'm currently the acting computer science department chair as well.

And underneath that, we have, we call them technology coordinators, lower, middle, and upper school.

We actually also have, and I don't have this on the diagram, an upper school computer science teacher, an additional person, because we have more computer science class sections at the upper school than we have capacity for one person to cover.

But then one of the programs that I think has been really successful for us is we have, we call them the merit program, which isMaking education relevant and interactive with technology.

So we have four full-time faculty members who are liaisons to the technology coordinator and help with technology curriculum integration, pilot testing new programs, professional development.

They do a lot of different initiatives, and it's been really helpful to build that relationship between the IT and the technology coordinators and the faculty, and sort of seeing each other's perspectives on what the challenges are and what their needs really are.

So that's been pretty effective.

That's really cool.

Do those coordinators report to the computer science department chair or to you? Well, a little bit of both.

Part of their job is technology curriculum integration, and technically they would report to me.

Mm.

And then part of their job, like the middle school coordinator also teaches seventh grade computer science, and that part of the job would be- Right ...

focused more on the computer science department chair.

We haven't had a lot of longevity in the computer science department chair position.

I've been the department chair many times- Yeah ...

in my career.

So there's been a lot of overlap there.

Yeah.

I used to be the computer science department chair years ago when the computer science- Yeah ...

department was just me.

And then I basically was like: I need to get out of this because I'm the one who's stopping it from growing bigger.

Now we have four full-time computer science teachers, but they have nothing to do with the integrator role that I think you have- Oh, got it ...

at Corning Road.

So there's a separate-- They're just a full academic department like English.

We collaborate, we talk a lot, because we're all kindred spirits, but they're just- Yeah ...

a separate entity from us now at the school.

They have their own budget lines, which took us a while to kind of work out, and just they get to be an academic department, which is very exciting that we finally got big enough that they could do it- Hey, so- ...

without me getting in the way ...

Jonathan, something you may be interested in, so our summer AI workshop, it's in June.

Tuesdays, we're going to do virtual stuff.

Yeah.

One of the people that's speaking, it's Douglas, he's over at Menlo, and he's in charge of computer science.

But one thing that I think is really cool, he's co-teaching an English lit class with like- Mm ...

the English department head, but it's like a computer science English- That's cool ...

like fusion.

Yeah.

That's really cool.

Should be interesting to hear about.

We have a few of those types of classes.

We have a Spanish class that is also an art class, and then we have a Python class, which is an algebra class called Algebra with Python.

That's super cool.

And it's fun to get those fusions where you learn two things at once, and they make sense.

All right, y'all.

We can keep going round robin and sharing, or we can pivot.

Other questions, things that you want to bring to the group or things you want to talk about? I want to hear what other people are doing.

I could share my anecdote that I told Jonathan at the Atlas conference that I was listening to his podcast and got angry when he said he had 16 people in his department.

Yeah.

I will say I feel incredibly fortunate that it has gone this way.

The number of kids we've had has not gone up dramatically.

I've been here a long time, and the department's like three times the size it was when I started, which is good and bad.

When I started, I was a network systems administrator, computer science teacher.

I worked with the integrators, but was not one, but I effectively was one.

And I feel like I had a better understanding of how broadly technology can touch a school.

And the more you focus jobs, the more I find it hard to make sure that the people we have see the big picture.

So while I'm glad we have a lot of people, sometimes wearing a lot of hats actually makes you better in ways that are not super obvious.

Okay, y'all.

So Robin's messaging me.

She's lost her voice, but she wants to share a visual with us.

Great.

And also, Robin, I'm really sorry you've lost your voice.

Allergy season is no joke.

Mm-hmm.

Also, I think she has a blackboard behind her, which you don't see all that-- It's a green board, but you don't see that very much these days.

I think that's kind of cool.

Robin, can you- Can you see the chart? It's really small.

Can you zoom in for us and make it bigger? Is that better? Yep.

Yeah.

So I'll talk as much as you all are willing to listen.

So this includes a whole half of our org chart.

You can see that our chief operating officer is responsible for all of our tech people.

We just hired a new director of information technology who has an associate director, systems administrator, technical support specialist Three technical support specialists.

We also have a web developer who reports to the chief operating officer.

And then my position is unique in that I don't report to COO, I report to the associate head of school.

My job title is senior director of educational digital strategy, so I'm on the academic lens with a nod to artificial intelligence and emerging technologies and how that's disrupting the educational landscape.

That sounds like a fun job.

It is.

Like, for real.

Oh, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lot that keeps me awake at night.

Can you tell us a little bit about your school? I don't know much.

Yeah.

I'm at McDonogh School, which is about 1,450 students, north of Baltimore in Maryland.

We're co-ed pre-K through 12.

Pretty rigorous school.

Any other questions? No.

All right.

Thank you.

Robin, thank you so much for sharing.

Okay, y'all.

Anything else? This is your last chance before we get out of here.

It does not have to be about this at all.

Are there any other challenges, summer projects, just things that you're grappling with, prep for next year, hiring, or departmental management? What you got for us? You got crickets.

AJ unmuted.

I just like sitting on mute, you know.

Oh, you're all right.

Yeah.

But we're in the midst of transitioning from Jamf to Mosel, actually, so it's been a bit of an exciting situation.

So we're just eating our own dog food now in terms of within the department and getting our test case users.

And so like Jonathan said, with regards to looking ahead to September, it feels like we're going to be pushing through the summer, making sure everything's lined up.

Why did you make that switch? We made that switch, I would say, for two reasons.

One was largely a business case reason.

We were on Jamf Pro.

We were used to some things in Jamf Pro.

The switch to Jamf School didn't seem like it was the move for us, and Mosel was just going to be significantly cheaper over the long haul.

And then I think that where it seems Mosel's development focus priority has been around the education space, and Jamf maybe less so.

Things like small workflow things that we deal with often, like adding new packages, I was in the evaluation process going, "Okay, is that thing in the Mosel catalog or is it in the Jamf catalog?" And 99% of the time, it was in the Mosel catalog.

Right.

Which is not obviously insurmountable.

You can add things into the packages and everything, but it just seemed like for the uses we were after, that was going to be a better solution.

And I think that on the Mac side, the Mosel class manager piece was a little bit more developed for our Mac users, so we're going to look at some of the ways we can give teachers some solutions on that.

But we've been with Jamf for a long time, so I'm going to keep a small number of licenses around too, just as a backstop.

But yeah.

We're Jamf also.

We've been Jamf Pro on site for a decade or so.

Yep.

And we were about to switch to Mosel, and then on Friday decided to stick with Jamf in the cloud because they took us seriously and realized we were really going to leave, and then they gave us a price that was a little bit cheaper than Mosel.

So they were not playing ball for a long time, and then they came back with a massive discount.

We're like, "Well, we'll kick the can down the road one more year." Mm-hmm.

Let them do the transition for us and stay on Jamf in the cloud, which gives us a few things we were missing.

I will say the documentation around Jamf, some of the API stuff does seem to be more fleshed out.

I got to go to an Apple executive briefing thing through our local Apple person, and the whole session was around basically Apple's own use of Jamf now, more or less.

And so- Yep ...

it clearly remains a super strong and robust product, but it just seemed like...

Yeah.

I was just doing a business case.

I was like, "I'm going to save $4,000.

Let's just switch to the other thing." Yeah.

And then they took away that case for us, which surprised me.

Yeah.

Ours is going to maybe save $12,000 or something like that from our previous contract.

So a year.

So.

Yeah.

It was hard to look- It's hard to look that down.

Yeah.

I'll take it.

All right, y'all.

Are we ending early? Anything else? Next time we meet, I'll tell you how it went hiring a programmer.

There you go.

Good luck.

Good luck.

I hope so, Jonathan.

I hope you're not waiting the next time.

Well, I didn't say this before, but also the industry that I'm hiring from is being decimated right now.

Mm-hmm.

So there should be a lot of programmers looking for work.

So hopefully that just means I'm going to be shaking them off with a stick, but I also don't want to get 4,000 applications and have to figure out what to do.

That's also hard.

Yep.

Got it.

Thanks, everyone.

All right, everybody.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So the group hasn't been super active yet.

Again, it's brand new.

But you do have the Atlas community boards for this group specifically, so the large school network.

So a couple of things I want you to pay attention to.

First of all, there's a directory, and a lot of people have filled out those profiles.

They're pretty extensive.

So they tell you what those people are really good at and what they need help with.

So if you have a specific problem, go navigate to that directory, check it out.

And the second thing is if you have resources that you want to share, feel free to put it in there with the group.

Again, job descriptions, hierarchy, all great examples.

And if you want to start up some collaboration on there and get input, again, from independent schools that are large, that's your group.

So let me know if I can do anything to support you in the meantime.

And if not, we'll see you again at the next quarterly meetup.

Thanks so much for being here today.

Thanks, Ashley.

Thanks, y'all.

Thank you, all.

Thanks, Ashley.

Bye, everybody..