Navigating the Evolution and Future of Technology Leadership in Independent Schools: Insights from Ally Wenzel

Narrator 00:02
Welcome to Talking Technology with ATLIS, the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for technology leaders all through a unique independent school lens, we'll hear stories from technology directors and other special guests from the independent school community and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics. And now please welcome your host. Christina Lewellen.

Christina Lewellen 00:25
Hello everyone, and welcome to Talking Technology with ATLIS. This is Christina Lewellen. I'm the executive director of the Association of technology leaders in independent schools, and

Bill Stites 00:35
I am Bill Stites, Director of Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy. And

Hiram Cuevas 00:40
I'm Hiram Cuevas, Director of Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher School in Richmond, Virginia. Hello,

Christina Lewellen 00:46
Bill and Hiram. It's great to see you guys. I haven't seen you in a bit since we were together in person for the Atlis annual conference, and now here we are barreling toward the end of the school year. I was on an independent school campus this week, doing some AI work, and you can already feel it in the air, kind of barreling toward graduation and year end wrap up. I'm already thinking about the fact that my college kids will start descending upon my home here shortly. How are you guys doing as we're looking towards the end of the year?

Bill Stites 01:17
I would say barreling is a good term. I just literally got out of a meeting where we're starting what will end up being at least at 12, if not longer, month construction project. Those are always, always great. And because of that, we're doing massive amounts of upgrades and whatnot. So summer is not a time for relaxing. That is truth. And once you hit the spring, it's like everything's ramping up. So that's definitely the mode I am in for sure. What about you? Hiram,

Hiram Cuevas 01:46
yeah, so we're definitely in that end of year sprint already. There was a small group outside looking at where they were going to lay out graduation. So they're already talking in that way. And I guess for me personally, the great celebration that we're about to have is that my senior daughter in high school is also graduating, so I'm going to experience two graduations, one here for our boys, but then one really special one with my daughter graduating from St. Gertrude High School. So thrilled about that. And let the wild rumpus start. Yeah,

Christina Lewellen 02:16
it's crazy. We all have kids of a similar age, and they're, you know, young adults, or moving into young adulthood. And it makes me think about how fast life goes, because doesn't it sort of seem like a hot minute ago that you were graduating from high school and college, and so if you had advice to give to your younger self, what would it be like? Sometimes I wish that I just would chill out and recognize that, you know, all my hopes and dreams are going to come true. I'm going to be a happy person. I'm going to be fulfilled in my work. But that's always hard stuff to wrestle when you're young, and it's easy to say with hindsight, right? So either I guess my question being, you know, what advice would you have for your younger self, or maybe what advice you have for your kids as they go through these big transitions like Hiram, are you starting to freak out about your daughter graduating high school? Are you doing okay? Getting sentimental?

Hiram Cuevas 03:06
It's a bunch of mixed emotions, because she's our Caboose, as I affectionately call her, because she's the third child, two older children, 28 and 26 and they're full fledged adulting right now. So it's like having a firstborn and the baby in the house all at the same time, but she's ready to roll she's picked out her university. She's gonna go to Virginia Tech in the architecture school, and so she's very, very excited. But, you know, I must admit, when she was away on her senior trip, we were like, wow, this is a little bit different. Now there weren't the shoes hanging out all over the place in the books piled up on the kitchen table, but we are certainly going to miss her. The

Bill Stites 03:46
thing I would probably go with, and I tell my kids this often, is slow and steady. Take it in. Take the time that you've got now at this point in your life and really enjoy it. Take deep dives on things when you can, because it only gets harder as you get older, as you enter into the workforce, as you start your own families and relationships, you're never going to have the time that you have to really understand who you are as a person and develop that person in really the fullest sense, and tell them and try to encourage them to do that as much as possible now, because it becomes that much more complicated as more things get layered on later in life,

Christina Lewellen 04:27
I think slow and steady is a fabulous theme and a great segue to our guest, because, speaking of a career that's been I don't know if it's been slow, but it's been certainly steady, and we welcome on the podcast today a person who gets a lot of respect in our space for having just been around since you know, it all started and evolved, and certainly has been an instrumental player in the development of ATLIS. So welcome to the podcast today. Ally Wenzel, how are you welcome?

Ally Wenzel 04:56
Thank you, Christina. I'm good. Great to be here. Very honored to be here today.

Christina Lewellen 05:01
So do you think that your career has been a slow and steady tell us a little bit about your slow and steady journey.

Ally Wenzel 05:08
Well, I wouldn't say it's been slow. It has definitely been steady, but it seems like it's always fast, fast and steady,

Christina Lewellen 05:17
fast and steady. I can go with that.

Ally Wenzel 05:21
I came to education, kind of roundabout. I started an industry working for Hewlett Packard, and when my daughter started school, I came into a situation where the school was looking for somebody to run their one to one program. This is way back in ‘98 you know, at first I was like, You got to be kidding me. No way. This is not enough money. And, you know, back way back then, they wanted to pay you nothing. Maybe they still do. But anyway, long story short, I came in as a consultant to the school when the person they hired didn't work out. And after that, you know, I just ended up staying six years running their one to one mocktail program, and then six years later, I became their first and only IT director. So I'm one of the OGs, just like probably Bill and Hiram here. I've been here at Stevenson now for 25 years in total, and it's been a wild ride.

Bill Stites 06:22
When you say those numbers 25 you know, I think it's 30. I know Hiram has got similar numbers. That's where you think it's been slow. But then you realize how fast it's been because it flips on you in a moment, you think back to, oh, I just remember when I was student teaching here. You know when I started, and those years, like the years with your kids, disappear quicker than you could possibly imagine.

Hiram Cuevas 06:42
So Ally let's date ourselves here. What was your first computer at Stevenson,

Ally Wenzel 06:47
we had the Toshiba bricks. Those bricks that were a Toshiba laptop. They did not have any sort of network ports in them. Everything was done with a dongle and a DVD drive. I don't remember

Hiram Cuevas 07:01
the model. My first laptop in 1991 was a Toshiba laptop with a blazing fast 11 megahertz and one mega RAM and a 20 megabyte hard drive. I thought I'd never run out of space.

Ally Wenzel 07:16
My very first computer actually, was a TRS 80 trash. 80 trash, 80, yeah, Radio Shack back in college, but that was just it's for word processing. But I digress. So

Christina Lewellen 07:26
Ally tell us a little bit about Stevenson. You've been there a long time, so how has the school changed over your tenure, you

Ally Wenzel 07:34
know? And I think about the arc of my career here we were kind of pioneering with the laptop program. Way back in 98 we started that in our lower and middle division. Well, middle division specifically, and that was a really interesting experience for all. And just thinking about the physical infrastructure of cables and wires everywhere, because there was no wireless back then and over time, we built that up into the upper school and just the evolution of the technology. I mean, if you think back in 2001 with the iPod coming out, and then things really started accelerating after that, and then 2010 with the iPhone, it's just, you know, I think about us having one server, no wireless, and now what we're dealing with today with just networks in general, with cybersecurity, with AI, I mean, it's just been a continual add of technology over the years that we are all managing. And this is what I'm thinking about as the conversation I'd like to have today is that those of us that have grown up in this specifically, you know, we've had kind of a steady evolution, and things have really accelerated a lot, I would say, within the past 10 years, and as those of us that are aging out or retiring or wanting a different environment? Who's going to replace us? That's a conversation that I'd like to have. I mean, we've had so much success with ECATD [now the ATLIS Leadership Institute], and now ALI which I was working with ECATD for seven years as one of the faculty on that and developing the up and coming technology directors has been a really important thing, I think, for the ATLIS community and for the Independent School world in general. And yet, I feel like the landscape is kind of changing as that is moving forward also, and I'm just a little concerned about where we're going to take this. Yeah, let's

Christina Lewellen 09:39
go there. Let's start with what you guys are seeing and hearing from your colleagues, because I'm starting to also get some of those rumblings that filling tech staff roles is tricky. It's difficult.

Ally Wenzel 09:52
Yes, you know, I am very engaged in the ATLIS community, and I also work with schools all over the go. Globe, essentially with education collaborators and consilience. And so in that work that I've been doing with other schools, I'm seeing more and more the inability to attract and retain technology directors that have the skill set that's necessary to run our schools. I mean, it's a very complex environment, there's a lot of breadth and depth that is needed. And frankly, for those of us that have grown up in this over time, we've been able to build that in a steady, progressive way. And what I see is people coming in or people that are in industry, first of all, they can make a lot more money than they can in the Independent School world. But secondly, in industry, it's more like your focus on a widget, whereas in a school, there's so much that you have to think about it's not just this widget, and it's not a profit motivation. It's about educating kids and what's best for kids, but you have so many different departments that are vying for resources. So it's, how are we going to take this forward? And I'd like to actually have this conversation with Bill and Hiram here today, and you Christina, to just kind of toss around some ideas of models that maybe we can explore.

Christina Lewellen 11:19
Yeah, because it almost feels like, in a weird way, maybe a bad analogy, but you know, the frog in the pot, right when the frog is in a cold pot, and then you put the heat on it over time, they don't notice that they're being boiled, right? And so what's happening now is that we're jumping into an already boiling pot of water. So tech leaders that came up through, as you say, you know, like yourself, they came through this generation of figuring it out. Every single year there's this new layer of complexity on top of it. So it was a slow roll into where we are today, but now that this sea is churning and there's so many pieces of the puzzle to manage for a new technology leader, whatever that role is, to jump in, it must be pretty overwhelming. So it probably feels it's not just that it's gotten more complex. It's that this train is moving and it's hard to get everybody on board Correct.

Ally Wenzel 12:17
You know, there's so much institutional knowledge that people like us carry, and when you're making technology decisions in a school, it's not just about the technology. You're having to think about what the mission is of the school and have that be the focus, but deploying the right technologies to make sure that you can fulfill that mission. And it's not something that somebody can just step into and be able to you know, it's not like to say, okay, hey, hello, new person. Come on in and just take the reins. There's more of a transitional nature to it, I would say. And we're doing good work with the Ally and within my own organization, I'm trying to mentor somebody that I've found to work on that, but it's a slow process, and honestly, I think it just takes time, takes years of being in the institution. So,

Bill Stites 13:14
Ally to your point there, I think you're looking at the idea of, can you develop from within and promote from within, because then you can take kind of like that long tail view of that type of professional development and that type of work that goes into building somebody up to assume that position. But then there's like the, you know, if you either a don't have that or your scope is so large, you know, you need to either go to another school and get somebody who has school experience, which is, I think, incredibly important to this as compared to what you might see in industry and business, as compared to what we deal with in education, so understanding all those elements, or you go out to industry And you bring somebody in, but then there's all right, what are the tools? What are the things that you can do to get them up to speed in terms of what working in a school is like, and what those differences are? Because often when we see people come into schools, independent schools, from other outside organizations, I see it mostly, you know, in areas like our development or communications offices where that happens, but I think you're seeing it more in tech positions now is the pace is different, the level of committee work that goes into that, that kind of collateral buy in that happens much more in schools than maybe they're seeing and where they're coming from. Where do you have the structures for support to get them what they need in those areas. And I think, you know, my go to plug is to say, well, that's where, you know, get them involved with ATLIS, get them involved in some of those other things. But I think that's the walk you have to walk. And I think it becomes that much more difficult to find those people. It's definitely becoming that much more difficult to find those people, particularly for people. You are in areas where skill sets that you need are going to be able to find better, potentially better, and I say better people can't seem to, but in quotes better situations, from maybe a payroll perspective, in industry, in tech, in other areas, and not have that pull to draw on.

Ally Wenzel 15:20
Yes, correct. I'm familiar with a couple schools that have been years without an IT directory, literally a couple years not being able to attract and retain or they've brought in people from industry that are just like, What is going on here? And they're like, this is not for me. I'm out. And so some things that education collaborators, for example, has been working with is the idea of augmented services, where we're able to bring in, for example, a remote CTO or a database integrationist that we're using people in our network, to help other schools on a temporary basis, to build capacity within the school, or to bridge some time, allowing a school to really find the right person. And we've seen some success with this, and this is not a plug for that. It really is in service of helping people within our network, within the ATLIS community, to be able to survive the landscape that we find ourselves in. And I think that from my own experience of doing this, is that not only are we learning by going into another school, but we're helping the school to understand what that looks like, what a real CTO or IT director person that's coming in, what those skill sets are, and how they're managing it, and what they can expect, or what they want to really hire for. And sometimes, you know, I think it might be even good for schools to look at not just the technical skills, but I think more and more people that are really able to have good project management skills, really good communication skills, both verbally and written, are just collaborative in nature, in terms of wanting to build those relationships. Because for myself, I found that that is super important for all of us in schools as technology people, because we touch everybody from facilities, housekeeping, cafeteria, you name it, anything that has an IP address we're involved in. And so being able to build those relationships throughout the entire community are really, really important. So if an IT director or CTO person can have those skill sets that maybe they can hire people within the team to do some of the more niche network admin or Institutional Research person or whatever. And so I, you know, I'm just kind of free associating on this go with you, but the idea that maybe just the whole structure is it needs to change where the person that's leading the technology space really is. I mean, we've been working on this for several years, right where the CTO has been elevated to a C suite person within the school, and not just a department that sometimes has a voice at the table, but always has a voice at the table, but that they understand enough about the technology to manage the people that are reporting to them. So

Christina Lewellen 18:34
keeping that in mind and knowing these challenges are evolving and maybe getting worse. What are some of the creative things you just mentioned? One which would be a temporary solution. I think we all understand that doing a remote or a virtual kind of CIO position for a school is probably not sustainable long term, because it misses that special secret sauce of connecting technology to the mission over time, I think. But what are some other creative things that we could look at as we're dealing with this crunch in the marketplace and these challenging roles? Do you guys have any other creative ideas in terms of how we can build up this next generation of Ali and Bill and Hiram technology leaders? So

Ally Wenzel 19:17
depending on where you are, I'm thinking that developing some partnerships with local universities or community colleges to have some sort of an internship or apprenticeship type program might be a way to build capacity where you have people just coming in to even see if they like it, because, you know, from my own perspective, when I came into the school, you know, I'm a child of educators. Both my parents were educators, and I did not want anything to do with schools, and that's why I went into the technology space in the first place. But again, through my own child being in school, and, you know, I was like, Wow, this. Pretty cool. I get to be on her schedule. And there's a lot of attraction to being in a education space, especially K 12, once you get in there, but it's hard to understand it or describe it to somebody until you're actually in it. And so the idea of maybe partnering with local universities or schools to bring people in and just help them to understand what it's like being in a school in the technology space.

Christina Lewellen 20:29
So we might have a marketing challenge on our hands, because I do think that, you know, with everybody out in the broader world talking about burnout and work life balance and finding balance to be able to, let's say, raise a family if we go along that path, because I think that is a huge attraction for people working in independent schools. These schools are stunning institutions of learning, and it's like Who wouldn't want their kids raised in that kind of environment? And so do we have an outreach challenge on our hands to let folks know this is an incredible opportunity for people who are maybe trying to get out of the rat race.

Bill Stites 21:07
I want to add one little tidbit to that, because I think it's really interesting. Steve France, who is the director at the Pingree school here in New Jersey, worked for me for a number of years. He's a recent graduate of the the ALI program. I remember back when his first year here, we had our first snow day, and I called him and I said, you know, stay in bed. It's snow day. And he was like, oh my god, I totally forgot about these. And proceeded to write a long, I don't know whether it was an email at the time or a text to all of his old buddies who were working in schools and just basically expounding on what it was like to wake up and, you know, wait for that call or wait to hear it on the radio. However you got that message. And he said, you know, you may make more than me in all this, but God bless snow days for real. And the responses that he got back. It was hilarious. And I love the story. I think it's absolutely a pure gem. But I think it's one of those things. It's like, you don't understand what all of those potential benefits are going to be and can be in a school between and I'll say that work, life, balance, that ability to be part of a community in a way in which you you don't necessarily always have, you know, not for nothing the time that you get. You know what I mean, you're on a school schedule at that point, not to mention for us here at MkA. I mean, I think one of the things that I always point to is our culture of professional development, how much we invest in our employees, in our faculty, in our staff, in developing them in areas that they're passionate about. And those things can, you know, and usually always do, align with the mission, but even sometimes they don't, and we let them have those opportunities, I know for a fact that you know, directly across the hall from where my office is is our PD office, and they have their budget for dealing with this, but one of the things I've done specifically within my own budget is I have a professional development line. I have a line for conferences, for PD, for all those certifications, because I want to make sure that I am in the best position to say yes as often as possible to those opportunities for people to develop and to have that opportunity for personal growth, because if it had to go through necessarily, all the other channels, you would be weighing your ask with all the other asks that are equally important. But by centralizing that and making that part of the technology budget. It's one of those pieces that I think really allows us to develop individuals, and is a proof point to some of the benefits that you can get from coming to schools. I

Ally Wenzel 23:55
want to echo that bill, because we also I do the same thing. I have a line item for technology training and professional development, separate from everything else, so I don't have to go through the other channels. And in fact, I require a certain number of hours of PD of my staff every year to keep them on top of things. And that works really well. But also, going back to your point, you know about being in a school the community and the education benefits, because we are education institutions, we want to further the education of our teams and ourselves, and we have people that have gotten their master's degrees while being here and moving on, so that really is another benefit that I think we could promote within the community. You know, as you say, Christina a marketing effort to talk more about the benefits, and also even highlighting the idea that for someone like me, like I get really bored if I just have to do one thing. Like, there was a point in industry where I was kind of in between things before I came to. Concern and and I was on this sun computer, for those of you that remember Sun computers, and, you know, doing some database stuff, but I was bored out of my mind. And so people that like to have a lot of different things that they do, they wear a lot of different hats, or they're able to work in a lot of different areas within an organization. It's a really wonderful environment for that, because you can, you can almost focus just on, on anything that you want to get involved with. And you learn a lot of business skills, you learn a lot of tech skills, you learn people skills. You learn a lot about education. There's just a wide variety of things that you get to do, so kind of focusing on somebody that likes to do a lot of different things.

Hiram Cuevas 25:42
Ally, you had such a unique perspective, having come from industry and then navigated into and evolved into what you are today in the K 12 space. What I find interesting is sometimes in talking to school leadership at other schools, when I'm doing audits. You know, Bill and I and you are all part of the EC audits on a regular basis, is sometimes this assumption that they can just get somebody from industry and place them in these strategic roles, and the need for them to be facile in so many different areas. I'm recalling a previous podcast episode where Bob from Ankura mentioned that enterprise is so much easier compared to the K 12 space and your use of the term the widget, and then being bored sometimes with the work that you were doing, this is something I think school leadership is challenged in recognizing what a unicorn a true tech leader is for their schools. Be curious about your commentary on that. So just

Ally Wenzel 26:48
to give you a little bit more color to this, I have my degree in computer science coming out of college, working in industry. And then when I started at the school, the piece that I was lacking was that education pedagogy. And while my parents were both educators, it was nothing like people are today. Okay, that was totally different time. And so I intentionally went back to school while working full time, while being a single parent. I got my degree in instructional science and technology, just so I could have that education pedagogy piece, and the school supported that. So going back to, you know, the idea that we can grow within and enhance our skill set if people are interested in doing that, and that was huge for me, because now I can have conversations with the academic side of the house, and they're like, Oh, you get it. You can speak the language and you're making sense. So it's not, you know, I'm just not saying, Oh, this shiny new tool, or, you know, we can't do this because of that. I'm sympathetic to what it is that they're trying to accomplish, and can look at it both from the technology side and the education side. So that was my journey in

Bill Stites 28:04
that the one thing I think that's really interesting there, and I think what you're saying just adds to what you said earlier, is that it's the idea of, you know, tech directors really have a com need to have a combination of those hard and soft skills we talked about, you know, good project manager. So you need to be able to collaborate. You need to be a good people person. You need to be able to communicate. You need to be able to manage different people. And then you have to know all of those things you know that show up on the topic. You and I love to talk about, at least, data maps, all those areas where you then touch. You have to know something about all of those, right? So you need to be good in both areas, and a lot of the times, you may be one of a very small number of people within the department. So it's like you need to be able to communicate the issue. You need to be able to diagnose the issue you need to be able to solve the issue in a variety of different things, whether that's in the classroom, whether that's with your buildings and grounds crew, or whether that's with the security system or the door access control system, or in the development office, or with admissions. You know, you think about the breadth of all of those things. And no wonder you either have people that step into it and are like, What have I got myself into? Or you have to find, as we talked about earlier, you have to have that person from within. The idea of school experience is one of those things. Whenever I put it on a job description, I'm like, am I ruling people out? Am I limiting the number of people that I can actually bring in? But it's almost the thing that you need above. I'm not gonna say all else, but it needs to be really high up there on those things that you need, trying to figure out whether it's like a nice to have or a must have, but you need to be ready to develop that if they don't have. It, and really spend as much time on developing that piece of it as you do on the hard technical skills. One of our recent hires came out of public school, and just the orientation to what that was was a big step. So even with that school experience, that independent school experience, and what that meant was a bit of a walk to take. Yeah,

Christina Lewellen 30:26
I think, you know, Bill, in the association community, we have a similar thing where no one comes up planning to go into association management. And so what you do is you look for some of those core skills, because you can teach the association people, right? You can teach the association management nuances. So there's never going to be anybody who comes up with that perfect skill set of technology, plus independent schools, plus education in general, right? Like that is the unicorn. That's why all of y'all are the unicorn. It's a big reason why we pursued getting the certification program up and running because we recognized there was this massive marketplace pothole, which is, where do we find these people? But also, how do we know if we have found the unicorn? It's very difficult for heads and for hiring teams to know that they found the right person. So what are some of those skills, you guys? I mean, the three of you are technology leaders, and you've been doing this for a really long time. So let's say you found a candidate that never has heard of let's say Independent Schools has never heard of edtech tools or even technology in general, cybersecurity. What are the core competencies like we might be able to teach those things over time and with professional development like the ATLIS Leadership Institute or the certification, what are the core skills that make you guys good at your jobs that have nothing to do with indie schools, nothing to do with technology, I

Ally Wenzel 31:57
would say, from my perspective, just the willingness to learn and the ability to listen to people, to have conversations. And, you know, a lot of our focus, especially now, we've done internally. We've done a lot of pivoting around our data management, and instead of focusing on, well, historically, a lot of it was like, you know, people want they come to us to solve a problem, instead of telling us what their problem is specifically and how they would like it to work. We've kind of flipped things a bit. We have a Tech Summit twice a year now, because we have five remote people working. So we bring everybody on campus, and we interview people, kind of like we do when we do audits. We have focus groups where we bring people in, and we're like, you know, what are the challenges that you're having within the work that you're doing? So we keep it away from the systems or the technology, but just what is the problem that you're trying to solve? What are the opportunities that you see that you would like to have some results with, and then we take that back and unpack it and try to come up with solutions based on the systems we have. And a lot of time it's just workflow, or a lot of times it's just training. And so it's again, going back to what those core skills are. It's really the ability to listen to problem solve, but to not be overbearing, or, you know, directive as much, even though our title is director, it's not to be directive. It's really to be more of a good listener and partner with everybody in the school. It's that partnership, the ability to create partners. Yeah,

Hiram Cuevas 33:38
so Ally we talk about relationships on this podcast so frequently, and how important it is to the success of the department, I want to follow up a little bit on your comment on the workflow, and I think each of us, at some point, has experience. There's the proactive approach and the reactive approach, and how much of the work that you deal with at Stevenson is in either one of those camps. I find myself often on the reactive side of the house, because sometimes the conversations aren't including everybody who needs to be at the table. And so as a result, you're trying to solve a solution where conversations have already been taking place, and then all of a sudden, now you're this has been put on you to make things work. How's that experience been for you at Stevenson?

Ally Wenzel 34:22
Well, again, historically, everything kind of just came to me and I had to figure things out. But post covid and just our whole data operations mindset that we've now taken, especially with this focus on data, and like I said, we have remote people, so we have really just kind of like, whoa, slow the truck down people, because they come to you and they'll say, like, Oh, I just need this form. It's like, Well, okay, what are you going to do with the data from that form? And is this something that you're going to be using repetitively, or year on year or month on month, whatever that is. And so we purposely. Actually have dialogs now where we are really slowing things down and unpacking what it is they're really trying to do. So for example, in our field trip form. So when you do a field trip, there's transportation, there's permission, there's just all sorts of workflow around that. So we've been able now to automate that whole process for any sort of trips or field trips, and it's triggering all sorts of processes behind the scenes. But now we have in our faculty portal, people come to one space want to do a field trip. You take in all of the information, and then it has all of the automation of those workflows in place so that the right people are being communicated with, and then we can replicate that. So it used to be much more reactive, but we have really done a good job, I feel like, in the past couple of years, especially post covid, of just slowing things down and creating more sustainable processes for implementation of things that are, you know, in schools, people are always, you know, everything's an emergency, and then nothing is an emergency, right? Because everything is last minute, and so we're just been really consciously trying to slow that down. One of

Bill Stites 36:16
the things that I think a good tech director needs to be, and I think you've both described it pretty well. The tech director needs to be the middleware. Yeah, the tech director needs to be the person. And you all touched on it, the communication, listening, understanding all those pieces. But you need to be able to listen to what everyone in the school is saying, take all that in, and then have the technical understanding to then be able to translate that to all the vendors that we have to deal with, you know, and all the technical requirements. And then you have to be able to bring that back and say, Okay, if this is what you're telling me that you want, this is what I'm hearing, this is what's going on here. And then here's the impact. Is how we're going to achieve those goals. And those goals can be your teaching and learning goals. Those goals can be your operational goals. Those goals can be anything. But when you think about it, you know, people don't have the time to really dig in the way in which we have to on these things, to really understand them, but they know, or they believe they know what they want, right? And then you have to be able to figure out, all right, well, how are we going to get there, what's the lift going to be? What is the cost going to be, not only in a dollars perspective, but in a human perspective, you know, Ally you just touched on it in terms of those data pieces, you know, we want to do this all right, what's it going to take to do that? What are we going to do with this? How are we going to support it down the line? You need to be able to take all of that in, synthesize it and then give it back in what I'll call human form, or, as I like to say, you know, talk to me like I'm a third grader. Talk to me where you can simplify things down to the point where I could understand it at a third grade level. Because when it comes to a lot of the things around it, you can't throw acronyms to people. You can't throw any, you know, really technical jargon at people on at least one side of that conversation, and then on the other side of the conversation, they don't get the teaching goals because they're so focused on the one thing that they do. Because when you deal with vendors, when you deal with people in business, they're dealing with the one thing that you're contracting them for. So it's walking, that walk between those worlds that I think a really good tech director needs to really develop and cultivate.

Ally Wenzel 38:25
I like that analogy bill that middleware, having been an industry where I was in the support realm, always worked in technical support, is that when I came to Stevenson, I've always had that customer support focus is that we're a service organization to the school, and sometimes technical people can be less focused on that, where, you know, I've got my tasks I need to do, and you're just bugging me, but to really keep it focused on, you know, we're here to serve the community, and how can we best do that? And it always has been about I used to say I was a translator between the coders and the people. You know. I would do that translation, which is the same thing as what you're saying, is being the middleware, taking the complex and making it simple, or taking the simple and understanding how to do the complex without muddying the water for the people that are wanting the work to be done.

Bill Stites 39:19
One quick example that I'll just give is that before we hit the record button, we were talking about some of the work that I was doing recently with our office of DEI. And one of the things there was just thinking about any type of name change, whether that's from a transitioning student to somebody getting married, and you know, the name changes that are there, and what we say we do as a school, and what we say we honor and we respect as a school, and then what we're able to do from a technical perspective, so that, all right, we're saying this, but do all of our systems on the back end support that? And then what does that mean? And then how do you communicate that? Because as the term I like to use there, it allows us to walk the walk. If. We're going to say we're doing these things, we need to have the technical pieces on the back end. And that's where, again, school policies, school guidelines, you know, processes develop, but they don't always necessarily have an eye towards, if there is a technical piece involved with it, what are the services that we can then do? Or how do we then support that and having those conversations bridging that gap. When I sat down with our director of we refer to it as diversity, inclusion and anti racism. When we sat down with our director here, Paris McLean, he was saying that one of the things he loves is that here at MKA, when he talks to other people at other schools, they're often operating in a bubble, whereas here at MKA, he's like, I go, and I feel like I'm walking on cloud nine, because he's like, I've got all these conversations, and I can talk to the ways in which we're able to do those things. So I think all those things go into finding that right person that can contribute in those meaningful ways and can have an eye towards those things. I think is incredibly helpful, and what makes us more of the unicorn?

Hiram Cuevas 41:03
So Ally what's interesting? I'll try and tie these two things together. All of us seem to be really tied to data. We love data we love data mapping. And I remember the first time I showed bill our data map. He fell in love with Lucid Chart, and has really gone gangbusters with lucid charts. It's such a fantastic application for doing this. And then your comment earlier about being that translator, that middleware piece that we've been mentioning, I remember the first time I showed our admin team our data map, and they were struck because I printed it out on the big 11 by 17 sheets, and I had to connect multiple 11 by 17 sheets to show the different areas, from operational to academic to, you know, admissions, all these different areas. And they were stunned, and then when they started to see okay, so how is my data talking? And they said, This is why we want to avoid silos. And I use Bill's color scheme because he says the black lines represent that no data that this is a manual data upload that you have to do in order to get this to work, that piece by itself, once our department so much street cred, because we were able to distill what and how data can be used for a school and why some of The decisions have to be made in order to ensure that you have a prerequisite in place before a new system gets added, and that it's the benefit of the whole school that often has to be looked at, versus a specific department, we all have to play well in the sandbox.

Ally Wenzel 42:35
Agreed? Yes, very well said. And you know, I've been mapping the network and the data for literally the entire time I've been here, because I'm visual, and I might, I have a whole wall here of maps and and it's great because people come in and they're like, Wait, that's what you do. It's like, Yeah, I'm the wizard behind the curtain who does all this stuff. But that's not what I'm touting. It's like, this is just so I can keep myself straight on when I'm trying to help you, I have to understand what the behind the scenes implications are

Christina Lewellen 43:09
before we leave this technical space that we sort of wandered into. Stevenson school has a day and a boarding program. Not long ago, we had Susan Baldridge on to talk about the unique aspects of boarding schools. Can you let us know a little bit of insight in terms of how things are different when you have borders? Because I think Bill, your example at that time was, let's say you have a faculty member who's living on or near campus, and they, you know, they do their work during the day, but then at night, they have to file their taxes, so there's a blurring of personal and professional lines, I would think when it comes to technology. So does that make some of the aspects of your job unique compared to some of your cohorts at day only schools? Most

Ally Wenzel 43:55
definitely, I had the privilege of living on campus for 15 years in a freshman girls dorm, if you could call that privilege. Anyway, it was, it was interesting.

Christina Lewellen 44:05
I'm with you, but I mean, I think I have a freshman girls dorm at my house with four daughters. So Ally, I actually feel your pain. And more importantly, I think my husband feels your pain,

Ally Wenzel 44:16
yes, but I always say that managing the school, we have 55 acres and two campuses, and we have 36 families that live on campus in addition to the five dormitories, and we have about 300 kids that are on campus, and we're PK 12. But the complexity is, I say it's like managing a small village, because we're 24/7 it never stops, and we've got everybody wanting to get their scale on the network, or their Sonos speakers or, you know, so the complexity of dealing with all these IoT devices on top of just running the school network, plus kids are here. They live here. And so you have all the gaming consoles, and you. Whatnot. So it's a real challenge to manage all of that, and it's obviously evolved over the years. But when I was living on campus, also, people were always texting me to want me to help them with their personal tech. And, you know, setting a boundary around that was really difficult for me, and over time, I was able to set those boundaries better and moving off campus during covid, nobody calls me well, except some of the old timers. Nobody really bugs me anymore after hours on the text. But it's definitely a much more complex environment when you're dealing with people who lived here, 24/7,

Christina Lewellen 45:39
yeah, I would imagine, I would imagine. So let's go back now to the heart of the matter today, which is this issue around attracting and retaining tech leaders. We talked a little bit about the challenges that we have in terms of attracting people, because the unicorns are unicorns, but what about retaining them? I've definitely noticed, you know, it's been a hard couple of years coming out of the pandemic, and tech leaders now dealing with AI, there's so much going on, and the layers of complexity are never going to go backwards. It's always getting a bit more intense. So for the folks who are doing these jobs, that are in these roles now, what can independent schools do to keep them What can schools do to keep great tech leaders in their positions?

Ally Wenzel 46:27
They're going to have to offer more flexibility in terms of really managing that work life balance, especially for those of us, as we're getting older and we don't necessarily want to be on campus 24/7, just for a variety of reasons. I think that we can do a lot remote, like I said, for our own school. You know, we've had to hire remote people just to be able to attract people that were quality, because we live in a really expensive area, and that's worked really well, because by having those people, and we've proven that it works, we're also able to retain those people.

Christina Lewellen 47:10
And you're talking specifically about people on your tech team. Ally

Ally Wenzel 47:13
it's our data team, so we've kind of flipped. We have data captains within each of our functional areas, and we all work as a data governance team, meeting once a week online, and then they come a couple times a year to have these data technology summits. But I think it's just being able to, you know, we talk about schools allowing us work life balance. And as the landscape becomes much more complex, especially with AI and cybersecurity, our teams are going to need to be bigger. It can't all be on us as the director to do everything. I mean, it's been a constant ad over the years, and a lot of our teams have grown, but not all of them, and I know a lot of schools that are just operating with fewer than three people, and that is not sustainable, given the landscape that we're dealing with, yeah, Ally

Bill Stites 48:03
we just in that idea of providing flexible arrangements. And the fact that you focused on the data team, I think is really interesting, because the current person that we have here at MkA, we're located in North Jersey, just outside of New York City. Well, he commutes from Brooklyn every day and does great work, and proved over covid, he can do great work from anywhere. So one of the things that we've come to an agreement for for next year is that we're going to allow him to work in a hybrid sense. He'll be in certain days. He'll be working from home certain days, because it works for that position, because it's one of those types of things. And I think as schools look to where they can make accommodations for that, I think it's interesting, because it's not going to be everywhere. It's going to be in certain positions, particularly in it, like our help desk people, the people that sit in our tech centers, I can't make that an option for them, because their job is interfacing with people. So I think it's interesting to see where you can find those accommodations that can be made, how you communicate those accommodations. Because I think one of the things there, and I was mindful of this in our head of school was mindful of this in terms of how I was going to communicate this to the rest of the department, is so that you don't feel like you have the haves and have nots. Why can they do this? But I can't do this. And I think if people look at you know what they're doing and how they're doing it, I think is very important. So as we make those more flexible arrangements for employees where and how, we can making sure that we're mindful of how everyone else is perceiving those and how do you then support those other people in ways where they feel like they're getting similar value and feel valued in the similar way as we move forward, to try to retain all of these people. Because I think that's the biggest hurdle.

Ally Wenzel 49:57
That's a really good point bill. Because. Example, as we were talking about in the beginning, that it's the end of the year, and there's event after event after event. And as post covid, at least in our environment, because we are an international school, we do a lot of live streaming. It seems like every event needs to be live streamed. And that's a big lift on my team, you know, we because we do everything. So that means nights and weekends. And so I've had to explain to administration that we're not like teachers, where we work really hard and then we have three months off. That's not our world. And so I work really hard to give my guys time off, or come in late, if they're going to be working late, or, you know, if they're doing some professional development workers like, stay home and do that, that's fine, and we'll fill in the gap so that, again, speaking to the flexible arrangements that we just have to be mindful that we don't burn out the boots on the ground, but keep them happy and keeping communication, because they are vital. When you have a good person at that help desk, it is huge. It's really huge. So

Hiram Cuevas 51:00
Ally what's the balance then between flex of schedule and then recognizing I actually need more people? Yeah, it's

Ally Wenzel 51:07
a good point. I think we're all still navigating that. I think that what we have to do is, instead of the measure being, are you here every day from eight to five is, you know, what is the balance of your contribution and your work, and measuring more what people are getting accomplished to setting benchmarks there to prove their contribution is on par with what the expectations are for that job.

Christina Lewellen 51:35
So Ally before we move off of our conversation about some of these issues that we're dealing with in terms of the workforce, of IT and technology directors. You have come up as a woman in technology, and there's not a ton of you. There are more of you than maybe in years past, but I'm sure there's been plenty of rooms that you've been in where you might be the only female tech director in the room or in the space. You've also done a ton of consulting with schools that are not your own. What do you say to women who are trying to get into a technology director role, maybe, for people who are not as evolved in their career that are coming through the ALI program, if they identify as women, any advice, any thoughts for them in terms of stepping into the big role.

Ally Wenzel 52:23
Don your Wonder Woman pose. You know you could do it, or you're Rosie the Riveter. It's funny because, you know, there's six kids in my family, and I'm number five, three boys, three girls. And you know, I grew up wrenching cars with my dad pulling engines out, and I just never thought I couldn't do anything. So I never developed that mindset of I can't do things. I got really lucky for some reason. I don't know why that is, but I would just say for women is, you know, just try not to limit yourself and know that we're all just as smart as guys, and maybe in some respect, women in general, have a better ability to multitask, to manage a lot of competing priorities, just as being a mother, That's what mothers have to do. And guys generally, by nature, I may not like this, but they're more serially task focused. They can't be juggling multiple things. And that's, I know that's a stereotype, that it's more of a biological thing than just labeling people. That's just been my experience. So yes, you can, you can do it.

Christina Lewellen 53:33
I love it, and I think that you've provided a lot of great mentorship and resources to women who are in this space. So we are very grateful for that, and thank you very much for that. You know, Ally you came to us and you had talked about, just generally having this concern about the pipeline of technology directors. What do you think folks can do if they share this concern, if we have ideas, what can we do as ATLIS and as a community of people who really, really care about this issue, and many issues pertaining to technology directors, what do you think we should do next? What can we do and what are some of the immediate things that we should try to address to continue to have this conversation?

Ally Wenzel 54:16
I think I'd like to first of all continue the conversation, bring more voices into the conversation, and start gathering different models that people are using, things that may be out of the box, that have worked for different school just information, gathering, collaborating with each other, having more sessions, perhaps at ATLIS around This or in our monthly online sessions that ATLIS does, inviting people to the table. I don't think it's an insurmountable problem. I just think we just like everything we do in tech. We just kind of have to be willing to adapt to the new landscape and figure it out. And I'm completely confident that we can. We just need to work together to do it. Gentlemen, what

Christina Lewellen 54:59
do you guys. Think anything else you want to add about just keeping this conversation going about it's an issue, I mean, and that's why ATLIS has been trying to address it with the certification and other programming. But we do need great, energized, passionate, thoughtful technology directors to come into our space. Any other final words on how we can get that to happen?

Bill Stites 55:19
I think one of the things is, how and where do we get that word out? I think about the people that might be listening to the podcast now, and who do they represent within a school or within an organization, and how do we get beyond the walls of that group, if it is us listening, how do we get this one step beyond, where do we need to go next to talk about this? I think Ali you talked about going to, like colleges and universities and working with them in terms of some sort of, you know, programs that can be their partnerships with them. I think getting the word out at that level. I don't think necessarily that when you go through an undergraduate program, are you necessarily thinking of the tech director role? I think that comes I laugh, because, you know that happens more so at the masters level, you go back a few years ago, there weren't even masters in these programs. So the ability to see that as an option, as a career path at that stage, you know, when we could really get people early on, I think, is work that we can do. And if we can invite those areas to the table, because there maybe they are in the computer science area, but maybe you go and you talk to the education students as well that have interest but don't see that connection. And if you can build some more of those. I haven't looked at education programs recently in colleges, undergraduate programs, but if you can get them, maybe an ed tech focus built into those, and talk about how you can move those things forward, we may see more people coming out of those institutions that are coming to schools that are looking to come into these roles. What's

Hiram Cuevas 57:01
also interesting is, I would suspect that, given the large numbers that attended the annual conference this past year, we have a lot of lurkers in that space. And it reminds me of when Twitter first came out, and there were folks who were just lurking in the background, kind of watching out the conversations. There are a lot of folks out there that have tremendous talent and have a lot of skills. And I would encourage our listeners, who attended the annual conference, because I'm still experiencing withdrawal, because it's over, is to get involved and be part of the community, because there's nothing better professionally than to join this ATLIS community in a very active way.

Christina Lewellen 57:42
Thank you guys so much for being a part of this conversation. And Ally as we land the plane, I want to ask you what I asked the guys to start out this episode, which is, if you had advice for your younger self, any words of wisdom,

Ally Wenzel 57:57
I wish I had taken more time to travel and do the thing I'd love to travel. But the idea that my dad always said, this life isn't a dress rehearsal, and nobody ever laid on their deathbed wishing they spent another day at work. So it's true, make sure to find that balance of working hard and playing hard. That's always my motto, work hard, play hard and buy that crossbow. Heck, yes,

Christina Lewellen 58:22
I love it. That's

Bill Stites 58:23
awesome. Oh, of course. So

Hiram Cuevas 58:25
do you know the crossbow reference there? Christina,

Christina Lewellen 58:27
zombies, I'm assuming,

Bill Stites 58:32
yes, yes, yes,

Christina Lewellen 58:34
always. Every episode, you can't

Bill Stites 58:37
escape it. Christina,

Hiram Cuevas 58:39
you are safe with this threesome.

Christina Lewellen 58:43
That's true. It's very true. Ally thank you so much for joining us and spending this hour with us. There's a million topics that we could have picked your brain about, but we, for the most part, stayed on our focused effort to talk about these pipeline issues that we may have. So come back, because I know the guys are just going crazy about talking about data mapping, so come back and join us another time. We'll talk about some additionally technology related stuff. But for right now, I do want to offer you a very heartfelt thank you for your time. I know you're busy. This was fantastic, and I love that you started a conversation. Now it's our job to keep it going.

Ally Wenzel 59:16
Thank you so much, Christina and Bill and Hiram. Always a pleasure to spend time with. You all. Take care and Ally

Bill Stites 59:23
I will close with what I tell my children all the time. So to follow up on Christina's question, “don't be good, just be safe.”

Ally Wenzel 59:31
It's good. I like it. Bye, guys.

Christina Lewellen 59:34
Have a great day.

Narrator 59:37
This has been talking technology with ATLIS, produced by the Association of technology leaders in independent schools. For more information about ATLIS and ATLIS membership, please visit theATLIS.org if you enjoyed this discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your colleagues in the independent school community. Thank you for listening.