In this milestone 100th episode of Talking Technology with ATLIS, Peter Frank takes over the host’s chair to guide Christina, Bill, and Hiram through a celebration of the ATLIS community. Enjoy a curated collection of highlights featuring past guests, "spouses' questions" that put the hosts on the spot, a special conversation with the ATLIS founders about the organization's future, and a special treat to honor the team’s favorite undead recurring topic.

Featuring clips from these past episodes of Talking Technology with ATLIS:

• Driving Deeper Learning with Ray Shay
• A Journey with ATLIS Founders from Origins to Future Aspirations
• Data Harmony: Integrating Systems, Empowering Schools
• Lakeside School's AI Journey and Technology Leadership Lessons, with Jamie Britto
• From Educator to C-suite: Jim Foley on Leadership, Innovation, and Education
• Optimizing Independent School Operations through APIs
• Matt Scully on Innovation and Collaboration
• Listening Leadership & the Future of Education

Photos of our hosts and their spouses

Matt, 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.

All right, welcome everyone to talking technology with Atlas.

My name is Peter Frank. I am the Senior Director of certification

and operations at Atlas, and I am loan hosting today. Please

don't touch your dial. Don't let that change your mind. Here we

have a very special episode. This is, in fact, our 100th

episode of talking technology with ATLIS. If you can imagine

that this will be the final episode of 2025 we figured we'd

end the year and just do something special. And we have a

collection of some of our favorite highlights from the

past 100 episodes that we're going to play for you here. I

said I was lone hosting, but I am not alone. So we have some

people here to help us reflect back. We have some special

guests. I will just let them introduce themselves. Go ahead,

hello.

This is Christina Lewellen. I'm the

president and CEO of the Association of technology

leaders in independent

schools, and I'm Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey,

and I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher

school in Richmond, Virginia.

So we thought this would be a fine idea. I asked

all three of you. I said, Hey, reach out with your favorite

episodes, and you all gave me some fantastic options. So we've

done some research here and dug up some clips and whatnot. We'll

just go through these and they'll ask you why you wanted

to share these particular episodes. We'll play the

highlights so our audience can enjoy it.

Here. I'm excited little walk down memory

lane.

It was really interesting going back and

thinking about it, because 100 came up quick. It did the

narcissist in me. I listened to every single episode that we do,

you know, while I'm driving around, because I just want to

hear how we did. And it was just nice to even go back that second

time on a lot of these and revisit them as we were

preparing for this. So I thought this was a great idea,

and it was really hard to pick the top 300% Oh,

for real, from 100 episodes. And like you, Bill, I listen to

these as well, just to hear the conversation, because it's very

different when you're interviewing 100% versus

actually consuming the podcast. We recently drove up to

Blacksburg, and I put it on, and grace is like, why are you

listening to yourself? I'm like, I'm not listening to myself.

She's like, Oh, you want to listen to Bill? I'm like, Yes, I

want to listen to Bill.

No one wants to do that. No one wants to listen to

bill. Great.

We're gonna kick it off. Bill. You like this? This

is Ray Shea. He was the director of technology at Brooklyn

Friends School at the time we recorded this one, what did you

like about this episode? Let us know why you recommended this

one.

I go back and I listen to these things because

we tend to get things out of them that we might not really

hear, and that sounds kind of rude as the host, but we might

not really hear because there's just so much going on during the

podcast on the back end of it that you don't always pick a lot

of these things up, but Ray, the reason I picked this one out is

for a very practical piece of advice that Ray gave everyone

about the way in which he conducts his meetings with his

colleagues. And I just literally had a meeting with one of my

colleagues earlier, and he asked, what's going well? What's

not going well, what can you prioritize and what can I help

with? And it's very practical advice. So let's listen to Ray

and you can understand a little bit more about that.

You know, one thing in like building a team I took

from my previous head is these little weekly digital check ins

that can inform our one on ones, and the platform that I use at

my previous school stand out that EDP now bought. So not sure

if small teams can use it very much anymore. But in addition to

it giving a strength assessment, so that you know everybody on

your team what their two biggest strengths are, and get kind of

like individual coaching tips on how to work with this person or

who to go to for what I love that it had a quick, you know,

the same way we'd have our students maybe do a fist to

five, get a quick pulse, you know. How are you doing today?

Is it a terrible day? Is a great day? These little two minute

check ins. What did you love this week? What did you load

this week, what are your priorities, and how can I help?

And those four things are so helpful, and I hope that with

this new position, that I'll quickly hear those things that

they loathe, and can figure out, how do we solve those things so

that we can protect those things that they love, and that the

things that are the priorities? For our school, and that's what

I think an evolution of our tech role is doing. Exactly that is

making sure that our team is not just structured in the best way,

but as you put it, Hiram, that they're all protected and

empowered to do the great job that we're actually hiring them

to do.

That's really awesome. I love that

selection, Bill, because whether it's ray or any of the numerous

other guests we've had, everyone is just so open to sharing their

nuggets, and that is a hallmark of the ATLIS community, and it's

something that I've been really proud that has been captured

within these podcast episodes, because it's just so reflective

of who we are and how you all help each other. And everybody's

always willing to just come to the table and say, look, it may

not work for you, but this is what I do. And as it turns out,

it might be useful for you and Bill it was useful for you,

yeah.

And it gives me the What can I help with? In

particular, like understanding the priorities is really

important. What can I help with? Gives me that little win that I

can help facilitate, if there's something I can do to make that

work so that we can continually move things forward and

understanding a lot of the times, like with what is and

what isn't working, These might be things that I'm not even

aware of. So it really helps surface a lot of the different

things when we have these one on ones. It was a great piece, and

I love them

for it. I really enjoyed

the protection piece because so often in independent schools

that duties as assigned sometimes really grabs hold of

your IT people, because they're often very competent problem

solvers, and so as a result, things get added and added and

added and that er can't function unless you actually have the

staff in place that can manage not only the incident that's

going on, but also the relationships that you're trying

to build.

Yeah, I thought that as well. So next, we have

another episode here the as soon as you start rattling off the

guests, it brings a smile to your face. We've got Shaundra

Simon, who was at Beaver Country Day School, and he was our

director of technology. Bernie McCormick, he was the chief

technology officer at Maren McDowell Friends School, and

Nick Marchese, the director of academic and strategic

technology at Emma Willard school. Bill, this is also one

of your episodes. What was it about this one that you like so

much?

This was the power three. And as we all spend a lot

of time talking about how we make data work and how we make

it work well, in the schools, these three individuals, they're

the bat phone for Hiram. That's the line I'm picking up, and

that's the emergency call when I've got a question, or if I've

got something, I need to ask about, how I can move,

manipulate, transform data and getting the three of them

together really helped me with a lot of my thinking. It was I

wanted to get the three of them in a room. Anyway, I always try

to get them together at ATLIS when we can, but getting them

together in the room was great. It was also the episode where I

realized just how good Christina is at what she does, because

trying to manage that from a hosting perspective, it was

definitely fun. And I, as Hiram will always says, I learned to

appreciate mom a lot that day, not only was the content rich

and meaningful, I think it spoke to what it really takes for all

of us to put this together in the job that we have to do to

bring this content to everyone.

They each had so many great clips to use in this

one, especially we could have just gone on and on with just

this episode, the clip that I ended up choosing, so it was

actually you bill, that had said, hey, help our listeners.

And this is a great example of this podcast, I think, and how

we get these just instantly usable, attainable things for

our audience to go and use. Bill, you had asked, if you're

brand new to APIs, where would you start? And the three of them

gave their responses here, I would say, start small. Find

something in a bite size piece. Don't try to integrate your LMS

and sis that doesn't have an integration. And I'm going to

write an API calls to both of these things like find something

maybe like that Zoom example I gave something that is a

relatively small problem that doesn't have an immediate

deadline, that you can sort of dip your toe in the waters, or

like Nick has this really neat solution in Google workspace

with apps, script and sheets, start just using his thing and

Don't do any API calls and just do some Google Sheet stuff with

it. And then when, when you've gotten a little bit used to

working with data like that, build on it, you know, like,

Hey, can I get one other piece of data from another system and

compare it with this? And slowly build up your skill set it can.

Be really overwhelming if you just jump into the deep end of

the pool. So just start small.

Nick How about you?

I appreciate that shout out. Shondor, I think

starting small is obviously like a really important thing, and

like having a really tangible thing you're trying to tackle,

because if it's just all conceptual, it's probably not

going to feel meaningful. You're going to lose bit drive. So

having something that you really want to go ahead and tackle,

maybe that you just want to go ahead and pull in email

addresses for students into one sheet, or you just want to go

ahead and you know, see if you've even hit this data point

on one of your systems. Just like having something that's

really meaningful to you, because that's where that

motivation is going to come from. If it's it's just because

we're telling you to do it, you're not going to do

it. Bernie, how about you?

I would say the best starting place is conceptual,

and we jumped right into some technical and observational.

When I teach this to high school kids, I actually spend a whole

40 minutes just getting the concept across. And there's a

company called MuleSoft that is actually used for building APIs.

It's the other end of things. When you're a software vendor

and want to build an API, but they've got a great three and a

half minute video that sort of breaks down like, what an API

is, using non technical jargon. It is purely like, how do these

things work? Right? And it's meant to sort of kick off

developers who are then going to write API's for software, but

it's applicable also to people who are learning how to do it.

And I agree with my esteemed colleagues here. You know,

having a use case, having a limited use case, but I'm also

going to recommend having a deadline, because of all of

these overwhelming aspects to an API. It's really easy to say

like, Oh, I'm just not going to deal with that for two weeks.

You know, having somebody say to you, whether it's an associate

at school or a vendor, saying, we're not going to support CSV

files anymore, you know, you can build yourself out a goal,

saying, I need to be able to get my prox cards activated or

deactivated from my LMS, and I've got to be able to do it by

the end of the cycle. Summer, and that motivates you to learn

the things that you really need to learn, and along the way, you

pick up tools that are then applicable in other places. And

which is the goal when I'm teaching this in high school,

I'm not trying to get a bunch of high school kids to be

developers by the time they're freshmen in college. It's to

give them some exposure and conceptual knowledge, which is

the most important rudimentary point, and then they can go and

apply it to whatever they end up using.

So this I loved, in particular for Bernie's comment

about, like, getting the little win, picking the little project,

picking the low hanging fruit, which is a topic we've all

talked about, you know, in terms of getting this done. Because I

think setting that frame, setting it out to achieve that

little piece that you can then build on is the way in which we

teach our students. You know, we just don't jump right into the

hard problem. We have to scaffold it up and build it up.

And I think that advice is one that we don't often take,

because we're always thinking of like the bigger problem that

we're trying to solve and trying to figure out how to get into

it. So framing it up that way, I thought was particularly helpful

for me in and at the time that I was thinking about this when we

spoke.

All right, so our next episode was hiram's Pick,

and Hiram you selected the episode we recorded with Matt

Scully. He was the director of digital integration and

Innovation at Providence day school at the time, do you

remember why you picked this one? Absolutely, I

consider Matt to be one of the exemplars in terms

of leadership and the fact that he is constantly wearing a

smiley face pin. And the story behind the smiley face pin is

just a perfect way to lead into this segment.

This clip has a quote that you like in

particular. We can talk about that when it's done.

I know that you also have been such a

wonderful mentor to folks who are coming up in a way behind

you as new technology leaders, clearly at your own school, but

also within the ATLIS community. Why do you think that's

important? Like, why do you contribute your time? I mean, my

understanding is you're always willing to pick up a call or

answer an email, so you know, you give a lot of your time to

help others in your position. Why do you do that?

You guys are making me sound really good. I don't

know what I owe you for this later, but you'll get your bill.

I don't even know that I can live up to half of this. So when

I started there was when you started connecting and building

your own network. There were a lot of us that were learning all

of this together, like these list serves. It was never

somebody who was the expert, who had done this a million times.

We were all doing it for the first time. And that community,

that sense of like, taking a little bit of this and a little

bit of that and figuring out how to make your how to make your

network come online tomorrow. Like, that was huge. So as I've

matured, as my beard has gotten whiter and whiter, I feel like

I'm watching the next generations come up through

that. And it's where I can offer, you know, a little bit of

like, it took me five years to figure this out, like, if I can.

And give you the Candyland shortcut to get past the

molasses swamp and get to the other side faster. Like, why

would I not do that?

That is an incredible analogy. Let's

everybody bookmark that one. That's great.

I don't think I necessarily know more or smarter

than anybody else. I've just been around longer. I've just

seen more things come through, and you can start getting a feel

for, I'm sure Bill and Hiram do this. Like, you start talking to

a vendor, and you know some of the right questions to ask.

Like, so how long have you guys been around? Who's behind you?

Like, oh, that's the same venture capital company that

basically creates new companies and sells them to somebody else.

I'm going to wait three years, and then I'm going to talk to

you again, because you'll have changed names twice, and you'll

be part of something bigger. I'm not going to jump in right now.

Or you find somebody who's literally on the edge of doing

something, and you're like, Oh, you're literally doing something

cool. And I'm going to get in on this, because it's not about

creating a commodity to sell later. It's about doing

something really cool. And those things come from experience, and

so anytime you can kind of shortcut things for people,

shortcut things for people and help them see those things, I

think that's good thing. Basically, it boils down to

this, when I was going into middle school, my mom went back

to teaching. My sister was a little bit younger, so she

wasn't necessarily in this, but my my brother and I had to learn

how to do laundry and how to learn how to make meatloaf and

start cooking. And when we would complain, the line was always,

You two aren't pretty enough to be useless.

Moms brutal,

and it's really kind of been this foundational

piece for me that, like, I have to find ways to be valuable,

because just sitting here isn't going to do it. So that's part

of what drives me. I'm loving that,

and I still love that, like, is it possible

to just hear someone's voice and be happier? Because that's how I

just felt with Mr. Scully popping on, he just brings joy.

I was

taken aback by how everyone smiled when we started

listening to that piece. What's interesting for me is I've known

Matt for a long time, and I feel like he's the Mr. Miyagi of tech

directors. He has a tremendous amount of humility, and tied to

that is all of this wisdom that he's more than happy to share

with the community. And on top of that, he's a sassy dresser.

You got to love the Paisley.

Well, you always have that mental picture in your

mind when you hear him speak, it's either the Paisley's or the

little smiley face that's on there, which is great listening

to him. It just speaks to the knowledge that comes from time

in a space and the community that you build over that period

of time, that willingness to give back and to, as you said,

pick up the phone when anyone calls. We need as much of that

as we can get. And that's what ATLIS brings to the community

and to everyone that's involved.

He is his own brand, that man, indeed. We

are lucky to have him in our community,

certainly Paisley shirts for everyone.

So we're going to change things up a little bit

here in a moment, but we're going to do one more clip, and

then we'll go to that this one was special. So Christina, we'll

pull one of the picks that you made. We wanted to do an episode

about the one roster standard, and so we had this opportunity

with our CO hosts here. There's a direct connection with the

guests and the products that our guests represent. We had Steven

Boyle, he's the product manager for API's integrations, and one

roster from Blackbaud. And we brought in Thad white, the

Director of Product Management for academics and admissions

from Veracross. So Christina, why don't you talk about what

made this episode so special and unique?

Yeah, I mean, I love this one because it

was, first of all, I didn't understand what one roster was.

And I felt like in that conversation, even as a relative

lay person, I was following along, but the idea of bringing

competing sis together to have a meaningful conversation, I could

kind of tell that this one was pretty special as it was

unfolding. And I don't really think this type of leveling up

of our information or these conversations that these

podcasts can accomplish is the type of thing that we would ever

see in like an industry conference or at a panel

discussion in person, right? Because they're competitors, but

the idea that they came to the room virtually to have this

conversation on our podcast, I felt, was just so impactful, and

they just really helped elevate the amount of information that

our listeners had on this topic. I loved it. I thought it was

just such a great representation of collaboration.

This clip is specifically when you brought it

to that, hey, I'm not a technical person. Each of you

tell us, explain to us what the one roster standard is, which

was interesting, because it really opened. In the door, they

could speak freely, and there's all kinds of opportunity to take

the conversation in various directions. And let's hear how

these two handled it.

I'm the non tacky person on this pod, so I

would love to ask you guys to explain to me what it is we're

talking about in terms of, Okay, so we've said one roster, and

that is kind of the standard that has been designed and

developed by one ed tech, a company that basically says we

need to kind of standardize how data flows right. So I'm hoping

that you can explain that, or if I've gotten that wrong, help me

and help our audience understand, especially those who

maybe are listening in as leadership, or folks who are not

deep into the IT side, but maybe more on the Ed Tech side. Why

does this matter? What is it and why even have this conversation

the way it presents to us, the way the

problem comes to us is, I've got this silo, I've got this manual

process. I want to use this tool, but I can't put another

task on my teachers. I can't give them another login. I can't

have this data just be abandoned somewhere. And so when we hear

that type of problem, the answer is an integration of some kind,

especially Dad and I both are an SIS a student information system

where schools want the source of truth to reside so they want

that information to flow back and forth. One roster enters the

picture to solve, originally, a specific problem of connecting

that learning management situation to all the tools that

these teachers want to use, providing a way to present

rosters and students and teachers information such that

there isn't manual entry, there's no data error because of

double entry, and then getting that data back once again, you

don't want double entry, and you don't want the teacher to have

that extra task of doing some additional step. You want to

remove the friction. You want to prevent the data errors, and

that's where one roster comes in. They built a standard. It's

not a product. They built a standard, sort of a rule set

that everybody agrees to abide by, so that when we talk to each

other, we know what information we're getting and we know what

information we have to give in order to solve the problem.

So Steven, before we started this call, you

kind of made the analogy that it's almost like a USB, a USB

cord, or whatever. They all fit in the same box, so we have to

agree somewhere what a USB looks like.

Yeah, all the different companies agreed to

put this plug on our machines and all the device and we're

going to agree to support the data that comes through the plug

and all the different power rules so they don't have to talk

to each other. All they have to do is read the standard and know

that if I present my system such that it adopts a standard that

everybody can work with me, that's the gold standard. That's

what they're trying to achieve, the Holy Grail, I guess. And it

has its benefits. There definitely are places where we

can talk about the gaps. Is every standard USB wouldn't have

evolved if it was perfect the first time. Same thing is true

for one roster.

So then Thad, let me ask you this,

whether you're with Veracross or Blackbaud or another system, was

this a welcome standard for folks like you that are offering

sis systems in terms of a solution to this problem?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, echoing what

Steven's already said, the core problem we're presented with is

our schools, globally, all over the place, have individual

ecosystems of software that they use. Right? There's no one tool

to rule them all, and so everybody's got these various

vendors, hundreds of them, and the SIS goal is to provide them

support and to enable them to use that ecosystem efficiently,

right? And so things like one roster, these standards where we

can say, okay, the bar for what it takes for us to be able to

integrate with XYZ vendor is now substantially lower because we

know we're speaking the same language we've established. It

is one roster. There's no drastic and huge process to

understand. Well, we call it this, and we structure the data

this way. What do you do? Like that interpretation that has to

happen when you're building a partnership and a true like

direct integration, significantly less effort on

both sides, when we have an established standard to align

with. So we can say we speak one roster. Do you great? Okay? So

we can get to usability, or at least testability, very, very

rapidly. So that's hugely impactful for us. And so as we

identify more and more key vendors and they align with the

standard, it just the market itself comes up as far as

interoperability and how easy that is for both schools and the

vendors themselves, our management is significantly

lower, because instead of managing eight direct

integrations, custom integrations with vendors, now

we're managing a platform in language for managing those, one

will get you many with regard to the. The effort put into that so

hugely impactful for us, things like one roster,

yeah, I mean, obviously this was just so

collaborative. The conversation unfolded from there. I recommend

anyone take the time to go back and check it out. I know it'll

be in the show notes. It was a great conversation, and I think

representative of what this platform can accomplish.

And I think one of the funniest lines of that

episode is Steve mentioned not stapling his cat to the wall, as

I recall, remember that

that's right, and we found a meme. It's in the

show notes.

We had to put a disclaimer. No cats were harmed

during this episode, right?

Or any episode of talking technology

with ATLIS.

What I took from that, though, was just the level

of candor that people brought to that in terms of the

conversation. Christina, you mentioned this earlier in that

you know, getting the two of them in a room is not something

you're going to see in a lot of different places, and it's just

the power of the pod, bringing people together in ways in which

you're not going to get anywhere else. And that's one of the

things I love about what we're doing

here, indeed. And speaking of bringing people

together, the three of you often bring your spouses into the

conversation some sort of reference or story or whatnot.

Given that this is the 100th episode, and we're trying to do

some special things here, we thought it would be fun to flip

the scripts and give your spouses a say in you know, if

you're going to talk about us, at least let us pick what you're

going to talk about. It's about. So we reached out to all three

of your partners and asked them to we actually want to hear

their voices and get their voices on the pod.

They do exist. They do exist.

So we wanted to give them a chance to come onto

the podcast here, in a way, and ask you some questions. They're

all friendly. I vetted them all. We've selected a few of them

here.

I'm worried. I'm scared and I'm worried.

I feel like you should be Hiram and I are

fine. Bill's worried.

I don't know where this is gonna go. We're going to

begin with Christina's husband, Richard Lewellen. Let's see what

Richard dialed up to have Christina talk about first, how

did McKenzie and Caitlin come to be our daughters? I hope he was

reading a list. He kind of like listed the three of them. So

that's why there's a little lift at the end there, but that was

one of his questions.

Okay, yeah, we do have four daughters, and

this is a very public in our world story, so I always share

with permission, and I like to let everybody know that. But our

daughter, Bryn, was in fifth grade, and she was very good

friends with a little girl named Mackenzie, who spent a lot of

time at our house, and she was about to basically go into the

foster care system, and there were department of social

services folks hanging around going, Who are these Christina

and Richard people that you hang out with a lot? And so we took

custody of Mackenzie and later adopted her, you know, working

in conjunction with some of her bio family, so we just sort of

took the role of parent, knowing that there were going to be

other adults in the picture, on and off, and then later, her

older sister, who was with another set of family members in

another state, moved back to Virginia, and we reunited the

girls, and they spent some time together, and we later ended up

adopting her older sister. So we have two sets of sisters. We

have our two biological children, Morgan and Bryn. We

have our two adopted children, McKenzie and Caitlin. So that's

how we ended up with four girls, and right now they are 2020 22

and 24 so we do not have twins, but Kenzie and Bryn are the same

age for half of the year, so they're currently 20. It's a lot

of fun. It's a beautiful story that is awesome.

It's awesome and it's expensive. I

was going to make a comment about like bathrooms,

and just like how all that worked,

the bathrooms we had. The Verizon

bill is a little intense. The car insurance, six humans and

six cars, that's a little much.

Yeah, so Bill,

I don't like the way you're smiling. No one can

see it, but I just don't like it.

No, this is very nice. Your wife, Brook, was

very gracious to send in some topics that she would like to

hear you talk about,

let's go. Let's go.

All right, here we go. Bill is our family's

Vacation Planner, so I thought maybe he could share with you

about our MLB stadium tour. I see, not bad.

Yes, yeah. All right, that's pretty good. And

the stadium tour, I have to say, has allowed me to connect with

ATLIS folk around the United States, as we've done it. But we

have two boys, our oldest of which is a baseball fanatic and

is currently interviewing. So everyone fingers crossed,

interviewing with a number of Major League clubs for his first

job post college. But we always would find ourselves going to

games and living in the northeast, you can kind of make

a lot of games pretty easily. You can get up to Boston and

down to Baltimore and so on and so forth in between. We decided

to do this after two things after having gone to our first

series of games, and we would bring my mother with us. My mom

is a very large part of the lives of both me and my family

and my sister and her girls. And 15 years ago, my father passed

actually due to an accident. And because of that, my mom got a

nice little nest egg settlement. And my mom basically told us at

that point, she's like, all right, I could hold on to this

and leave this to all of you, or we could have a lot of fun. And

if you know anything about the Stites household, we decided to

have a lot of fun. So my mom, she was willing to help, and

jumped in with both feet, and we managed to travel all the United

States, popping in and out of stadiums. If you haven't done

it, it is a great way to see the country, because everywhere we

went, we booked two days, because if we got rained out, it

wasn't like we were going to be able to go back. So we always

booked multiple days, and with those days, we then would string

together anywhere between three and four different cities, and

we fly into one, or we drive to one, and then we drive all

around, then we go back. So it was a fabulous way to go about

doing it. And a ton of fun, fantastic.

That sounds like a lot of fun, and a great way to

use that nest egg, as you say. So Hiram, your wife Grace says

there's a number of topics, and I thought this one was

particularly appropriate for our podcast and the various topics

that we throw in at the beginning of the episode and

sometimes throughout the episodes. I think you'll enjoy

this. So here we go with your wife Grace's question.

This is a fun one. If you and I could be

superheroes together, who would you be? And which superhero

would you wish I could be as we gallivant through the universe

together.

Ooh, that's a good one.

She sounds so sweet.

She's definitely the nicer of the two.

Hiram doesn't deserve her. I don't, I don't, I really don't.

Let's see, do I go DC, or do I go Marvel? Interesting. You're a

DC guy. Hiram, go. I am a DC guy. You know, what would be

kind of fun is if we were Batman and Bat Girl together, they're

simpatico and they compliment each other, well, we'd have the

car and the motorcycle.

That's right. So speaking of super people, and we

talked already on this episode about the fantastic

personalities and character that we get with our podcast. So

Christina, you had mentioned specifically we did an episode

with Jim Foley, who was the head of school at manliest petell

Hill School in Syracuse, close to where you grew up. And Jim,

he wasn't brand new, but he was still relatively new. He hadn't

done it too long before you did this. So why don't you tell us a

little bit about what you liked about Jim and this episode.

I may be biased because I spent a couple

years serving with Jim. He had been on our board. He was a

Finance Chair for me for a while here at Atlas. But overall, Jim

Foley is just a wonderful human he's such a great leader in the

Atlas world. And then he took over this really challenging

Head of School role, and I really enjoyed just how casual

and friendly this conversation was, and he kind of walked us

through his leadership journey. I know there's a lot of folks in

tech roles who wonder if they can evolve outside of that into

broader school leadership, and he was one of those people who

did that. And, you know, I thought it was really great to

just kind of talk to him in such a casual setting, to hear about

it.

And this clip, I think, is going to demonstrate

that he's going to outline his non traditional path to become

head of school via the Director of Technology role. And I think

you get a good sense of who he is and why he's seen as a

leader, certainly in our community.

So I know that you had a couple different

roles when you were at St Luke. So before you come. To walk down

this path to becoming ahead. What did you do in those 24

years at that school? By way of background,

I'd probably be helpful to know that that path

was informed by the fact that I didn't come to schools right

away. As my first career, I started out with an early career

in banking and corporate finance, before I came to my

senses and realized that school was where I was, where I really

belonged. So I was a 91 high school grad and 95 college grad,

and all those summers in college, and then all throughout

the 90s, I was working in corporate environments, and my

mom was a computer teacher. Growing up, she installed our

first ever lab of Radio Shack trs. 80s, I grew up with an

apple to E in the home. So anyway, you know, worked on Wall

Street and all that stuff, and watched the windows and desktop

computing revolution completely change everything, right? And I

got to schools in 2000 and I looked around, I'm like, where

are all the computers? Because there were none, at least not

widespread then. So I got lucky. I answered and added the

newspaper for a varsity girls basketball coach, and they hired

me to coach the team that year, and then they hired me the

following year to teach algebra one to middle schoolers. They

took a chance on me. I taught algebra for about nine or 10

years. I got a master's degree in Educational Technology at

Fairfield University while I was working full time, and then

became a full time instructional technologist did that for a few

years, and then the school in 2011 launched a program called

the Center for Leadership, and I was lucky enough to be its

founding director. That took me to becoming from there, the

assistant head of school for leadership and innovation. And I

did that for about six or seven years before coming here to

Syracuse.

That's really cool. Let's go to that

center for leadership, the founding director. What was that

all about? What was the school's goal behind this initiative?

Well, it was

interesting in that it was kind of a back to the

drawing board type of moment. So we had this huge capital

campaign that was on tap, ready to launch and go. And that was

in the fall of 2008 then the world fell apart.

Oh, I remember that I was finishing up

my MBA when that happened. And I happened to be in China on a

residency, a two week residency, with my executive MBA program.

And we were hearing about all this nonsense happening with the

stock market. We're like, what is happening. And of course, our

phones weren't working as well back then. And so we came home

to some chaos.

Yeah, well, we had this, I mean, like, like, a $50

million campaign that we were thinking that we were going to

do, and so they dramatically scaled that back. And they're

like, Well, what can we rescue out of this? And they figured,

we can upgrade the cafeteria. And so

they did that. I mean, that's important,

yeah, and then one of the things that came out of it

was this overwhelming sentiment that we were preparing kids well

for college. We heard that from a lot of our constituents, but

increasingly they were saying that they felt that beyond

college prep, our graduates needed more in order to be well

prepared, effective, competent, thriving young professionals.

You think about a 25 or 26 year old, couple years out of

college, in the workforce, and a lot of that centered around what

we observed at the time of amidst a fall out of all that

chaos. It was increasing globalization. It was rapid

increases and innovations in technology. It was ethical

decision making. It was kind of complexity theory, if you will,

seeing all of the ways in which the world was really changing

rapidly. And so people kept expressing that under the

umbrella of leadership, leadership skills, leadership

competencies, leadership ethos. And so we thought, you know,

this was kind of, I think, the key insight that if a child

graduates high school with distinct, concrete leadership

skills, it's more likely accidental, rather than

intentional on the part of the institution. Maybe they pick it

up in a class or a club, or if they Captain a team or something

like that,

right, right? It's kind of hit or miss,

depending on the kid and what they're involved in exactly.

And so that insight then led us to ask, well, what

if instead we said we wanted to try to intentionally develop

leadership skills in every child every year? What a great gift

that would be, and what an interesting obligation maybe to

assume. And so that was the genesis of it.

I love that. I love hearing his voice again,

and I forgot about that. And what a wonderful reminder. We

need to put him on the list, Peter, let's get him back. I

would love to just check in with him and see how he's doing. That

dates all the way back to the summer of 24 so it'd be really

great to tap back into how things are going with the head

of school gig, for

sure, I love the way he ends it. It's that this

is a gift and an obligation. It's just a really unique way of

thinking about that particular initiative, and it's something

that

you should do 100%

I think it's also very interesting to see. Where

those next steps are. You know, so often we're in our role, we

don't get to hear from people that have taken that next step.

And I thought it was a great example

of that excellent bill and Hiram, the time has

come. Uh oh. I think I know there was one episode. This is

the only episode that two of the hosts said, I want to hear that

episode again. Oh, 100%

this was validation. This was the moment

where all of the disbelief, all of the doubting, all of the you

two are just children, came home. We are children. I know.

Why are you

making me relive this? Peter? I know what

this is gonna be.

You can't ask her that question. You can't go

there with her. You can't do that.

She was a serious guest. She was a really

big gap for us, and I was afraid you idiots would chase her off.

We can't have nice things, is what you

were thinking. Christina, I mean, all

the time, usually

we can't have nice things because of Bill and

Hiram. But yes, you can. We connect on all sorts of levels.

See, she's used to a very mature household, a

household full of women, and Richard is fighting to survive

here. It's the reverse.

I think he's fine.

I think they're all fine to let our listeners in,

our avid listeners, already know what the topic is going to be

and what words they're going to hear. They already know that,

but if you don't remember, if you didn't hear it. So we were

very fortunate to have Dr Nicole Furlonge, the professor of

practice and the executive director of the Klingenstein

center. We don't even need to set it up. The clip speaks for

itself.

I am bringing this up specifically to watch

Christina's eyes roll and to have Hiram smile,

please tell me you're not going to ask this

woman about zombies. Oh, Bill, she's a doctor.

Oh, no, no, no, no. It gets better than this. The

Book World War Z Nicole educate Christina on the Book of World

War Z and your history with it. Yeah.

So I mentioned the holder to school earlier,

when I was a faculty member there, there was a practice of

having an all school summer read. Everyone in the school

would vote on a couple of titles, then we would read the

book over the summer and come back and do all kinds of

activities around the book. One year, the book chosen was World

War Z, and there was a split reaction in the room when I

announced, because I was the English department chair, so I

got to make the announcement, and there were people who could

not believe that I didn't somehow change the choice that

would have been my side of the room, but

it was an amazing book to read because it

poses as an oral history that reflects on a war that has

happened between zombies and humans. I can't stop laughing,

but it actually was so fun. We created games like this version

of tag and freeze that was between some advisories that

have been designated as zombies and some humans, had a whole

colloquium faculty and students get up and talk about their

takeaways. One of the cool things, though, that I have to

say about the book was that, because it poses as oral

history, it really got us thinking about what it means to

be a storyteller, and from what vantage point and from whose

perspective and for what purpose. And so we ended up

talking about identity. We ended up talking about history, and

who gets to tell history from whose perspective? It was a

really enriching experience. And it was, it was all built around

zombies. It was incredible.

Nicole, did you have you listened to the audio

book? Yes, I did. It's even better, I think, as an

audio book, it's a great audio book, which is

very different from the book. It's not even the

book. Yeah, the audio book is an incredible experience. Yeah,

100%

we're getting that for you for Christmas.

Christina, all right, all right. This one

I'll actually take only because she has the street cred. I Yeah,

Shazam, that's all I gotta say.

I never did get that present. I'm just

saying that was the best where's my present?

It's coming to you soon.

I've got a couple of audible credits so it's

coming your way. I've listened to that story at least a half a

dozen times. And I've also done it with my teams when we're

traveling, because they love it so much.

I've done the same thing, just put it on when I'm

driving.

It's about six and a half hours long. It's a

fabulous read.

There you go. Christina head in your way, and

look at her face. It says it all right. She's not

saying anything, but she's just like, it's. Defeatist. It's just

like, why can't I have nice things? Why can't I win just

once?

Oh, I win just you don't know the ways in

which I win.

All right, we have just a few more of these left.

We also want to get to a few more spouse questions. So this

next episode, Hiram, this is another one of your picks. We

brought on Jamie Britto, the director of technology from

Lakeside school.

So I've known Jamie for a very long time. I

first met him when he was at Cape Fear Academy, and it was

with his NAIS book tour, essentially with early tech

leaders, and he just started getting my mind thinking about

how to work with technology in schools from a leadership

perspective, and that it wasn't just the nuts and bolts, it was

also the relationship building and the need to Be a presence

and a support structure so that you understood what the teachers

were dealing with when they were in the classroom. That goes on

even further when he shared with us his story when he was at the

Collegiate School about cyber security. I remember coming back

to St Chris in 2017 and said, we've got to start paying

attention to this. This is frightening. He was always on

the cutting edge, and he's still doing great work out in the

state of Washington with AI, and it was such a pleasure to hear

Jamie. And if you are around him enough, you realize he has a

tremendous sense of humor a little dry at times, but it's

fabulous.

I also noticed that with all of the episodes we

picked and all of the clips that we had, there was almost no AI,

in contrast to the way it's felt the last year plus, where we

don't have an episode that does not mention AI. So I decided to

pick one of the clips where Jamie talked about AI. So here

you go. We always get around to talking about AI. There are many

different positions people have taken, and there's often simply

uncertainty, or, yeah, we're holding back or restraining a

bit, but your school has just gone all in with the AI. I'm so

I'm fascinated, you know, people worry about the challenge is,

I'm curious what challenges have already arisen, and how are you

tackling that? How are you approaching those things?

Yeah, great question. I think as we look at

the different aspects of our community, or components of our

community, we have faculty, we have students, we have

leadership, we have families, I think what surprises me in AI

perhaps more than in other places. And maybe it's not a

surprise given you know how big it is, but like, the emotional

response that people have to it is greater than the introduction

of a smart board or the introduction of an LMS. So there

are a wide range of like from very enthusiastic people to

people who feel like this could be the beginning of the end of

humanity, you know, that have concerns about copyright and the

impact on the environment and the impact on other people of

society, and like, you know, where are some of that training

happening in other parts of the world? And so we're having all

of those conversations. We're having the difficult

conversations about, what does it mean to teach and learn and

work in the world of rapidly changing AI and one of my

favorite moments, the succinctness of students.

Sometimes there's another group that is called the AI advisory,

which is a less technical group, more interested in these

societal issues and advise in the school on how they should

approach it from a student perspective, a panel of five or

six students from the two groups came and sat before the Upper

School faculty and answered questions from the faculty, and

Lakeside is really rooted in the Harkness table model and the

Socratic method, and so There's a very strong culture of

students and faculty engaging in that type of dialog. You know,

teachers kind of kept hitting on certain points about

inappropriate use of AI. And where is that line and the

concerns, and I think I inferred in that the concern about, well,

I've learned how to do this job really well. I have, you know,

2030, years of experience doing this job, and this is up ending

that. And one of the students after that, in some back and

forth about, like, you know, what's the difference between a

Google search and an AI search? And those types of discussion

said, you know, at the end of the day, I think you're just

going to have to change your assessments. And I thought,

like, yeah, that's a succinct statement, and that is a

challenge to us about if we're doing that, then we're going to

need to change that. And then a parent group we were talking

about that, and a mom who was working in one of the tech

companies here in Seattle said, Soon, extrinsic knowledge will

be at our fingertips. What we do with. Intrinsic knowledge. How

we cultivate intrinsic knowledge will be the challenge to

schools. So how do you do that? And I've been having that play

over in my head frequently, because in my life, you had to

get the extrinsic knowledge first before you could then

develop intrinsic knowledge. And so, you know, it's a cognitive

shift for me to think about how you could begin building

intrinsic knowledge without having acquired the extrinsic

knowledge. So I think those are, you know, uncomfortable places

to be there aren't ready answers. You know, Eric Hudson

is has a phrase, something like fluency with AI before policy.

And so we have a very succinct policy. It's two sentences

relate for kids, and I think, you know, we need to keep

getting fluent with it, and it changes so quickly. That's

another part that's different than other kind of adoption

pieces for us that where we were 18 months ago is not where we

are now. So I think you know, being able to not be too

attached to any particular insight right now is important.

I'm struck particularly by his empathy to

the other constituent groups within a school. He really tries

hard to meet them where they are, and also pose provocative

questions. And you can tell as he's speaking, he's also

thinking about the response and is being really mindful of what

that next step is going to be in this process.

Yeah, it's a really great way to think about

the wrestling that we're doing with AI right now, just very

high level and pretty succinct. Honestly, it boils it all down

to what we're wrestling.

And one of the things I neglected to mention.

And this is kudos to Mr. Frank here. This was one of your

first, I think, debuts, doing the post of the pod. And you

were rock solid despite anything Mr. Stites may have said to you,

thank you, Hiram, because he says a lot he does

all good things. Peter, all good things.

Yeah. No, I appreciate that. I mean, it

feels like pretty big shoes to fill, because Christina does

such a good job. And both of you, Bill and Hiram, you

mentioned how Christina does such a good job in all of these

episodes, it was fun to take on the hat and a lot of prep. The

key to that is a whole lot of prep practice, practice. So

again, bringing it back around to the three of you, because the

three of you have contributed so much to this project. And I know

ATLIS as an organization, and I know our community appreciates

it very, very much. So we'll go back to bringing your spouses in

to give you some last questions here for you to field. So

Christina, again, we'll start with the lewellens, and we'll

start with something that Richard would love to hear you

talk about, tell the folks about my level of game, and That's in

air quotes when we first met.

Y'all It was so bad. Honestly, it's a miracle

that we ended up together, and he knows it, which is why we

joke about it now, but he will say that he was intimidated and

worried about screwing things up. So when we first met, he was

singing in his barbershop quartet. You guys all know that

I have this other world that I'm a part of, and I knew of these

guys had their album albums in my car like we all knew them.

And Richard tried to talk to me, but basically just sort of he

invited me to go out to dinner with his Quartet, and then we

sat there, and his other quartet mates talked to me while he

ignored me entirely and spoke to the coach that was also at the

dinner. So he sat next to me, but didn't talk to me. Instead,

he put his charming, married friends to do his bidding for

me. But He's a good dude, a quiet dude. It was a slow burn,

but pretty much inseparable since then. So no game

whatsoever. Mr. Lewellen, not then, not now, not ever. And I

love you, babe. Nice.

I mean, as a fellow barber shopper, I mean, I can

tell you like I was courting a young woman, and I invited

myself to sit at Richards quartet's table to be the cool

guy. And it worked, all right, so it's a ball or move that he

did there, come sit with the Quartet.

Oh yeah, his Quartet. Super charming,

extroverted. So it was a good strategy, but it was a little

weird to be on the receiving end of it is all I'm saying.

So Bill, I heard slow burn and ballin in the same

description. I don't know where this goes.

That's awesome, though. Cut that out.

This

next one's a. Interesting because Bill's wife,

Brook, laid out a question, but that she kind of gave like

multiple options. That's Brook, okay. I like this. Choose your

own adventure. That's right.

Okay, okay, let's go. Here we go.

One of the things about Bill is that he is a very

thoughtful person and creative and funny, so I thought he might

want to share about how we met for the first time at MKA, or

possibly our first date at the beach, or our engagement in

Vermont. Hiram, this is tough, right? Many options, I kind

of want to hear about the proposal, hmm, as

the only girl on this podcast, can I please hear about the

proposal? Okay, yay. I win. Thanks, Brook.

So the proposal was this, for those of you that are

not aware Brook is a so

excited, the proposal was yes, Brook.

And it's funny, because I was just talking to a

colleague about this, and you'll understand why in a second. So

Brook is a Spanish teacher, and I don't know a word of Spanish,

and she, at the time, was studying at Middlebury College

that has a very well known, well respected program for Masters in

foreign language, and they have to sign a language pledge when

they go that they're only going to speak in the language for the

time that they are there. So Brook and I were corresponding

via pen and paper. We were actually writing letters back

and forth to one another throughout the

summer, chisel and stone indeed.

And I decided I was going to come up one weekend and

we were going to kind of just have a little getaway weekend up

in Vermont. Brook is a Vermont native. We go up. And she was

like, bring your bike up, and we'll go for a ride. Well, I had

this plan where I wanted to ask her to marry me, and I wanted to

do it on the top of J peak. Now, if you know anything about

Vermont geography, where Middlebury is and where J peak

is is not exactly close. So we go up and we load the car up

with the bikes, and she is complaining the entire time as

we are driving up the J peak that we could have been on a

bike ride and having done all of this stuff and been on to other

parts of our time the entire time, just giving it to me to

the point where I'm like, do I really want to do this? Is this

the person that I want to spend the rest of my life with now we

stop halfway there in Burlington to get a bite to eat, and in the

Stites household, the adage is that what is mine is hers, and

what is hers is hers. So she goes into my pocket to get my

wallet to go buy something to eat. And almost thankfully, I

had cargo pants on at the time, cargo shorts, I should say, and

I had the ring in a different pocket than what she was going

in. Otherwise we would have been proposing at like the

McDonald's, or wherever it was that we stopped, it probably

wasn't McDonald's somewhere else. So we get all the way up

there, and we get to the top of the mountain. You take this

gondola up, you can take your bikes up, and you can ride down.

And the part I'm leaving out is that for the two weeks leading

up to this, I was asking my niece, we lived down the shore.

We were living in Margate at the time, which is right next to

Atlantic City. I was asking my cousins, I should say not, my

niece, my cousins, who had a number of Hispanic friends. How

do you say, will you marry me in Spanish? And I was getting

Mexican, I was getting Cuban, I was getting Puerto Rican, I was

getting all of these different dialects around. How you say,

will you marry me in Spanish? And I'm writing it out

phonetically. I've got it, like, on pieces of paper in my wallet.

So like, when I go to the bathroom, I'm rereading it my

head. I'm getting on the tram, like, reread all this stuff, get

to the top of the mountain, can see beautiful surrounding views

of all of Vermont, and propose to her in Spanish. And she looks

at me and she says, what, I think? Thinking to myself, Oh my

God, what did I just ask her? Did I properly say, will you

marry me? I asked her again, and I think what I showed her the

ring at that point, which I was scared to death of dropping,

because I'm on like, all these rocks, and it's just gonna

bounce and get lost, saying it one more time, showing the ring,

it kind of

all just clicked. Context clues. She got

it exactly.

She said yes. And the other reason we went so far

up is she had a lot of family up in that area, so we went and

spent the evening with them. But that was my, of course, long

winded way of telling you the story of the. Engagement.

Well done. Nice. Yeah. Who would have known that

Bill Stites was such a romantic guy,

caring and creative too, is what she said. Don't

leave that out,

Hiram, that's true. Man. Very

good. And we'll continue with the romantic flow

here with the last question from the spouses. This is a hiram's

wife Grace with her question for Hiram,

what has been your favorite memory with you and me

as couple? Maybe we weren't married yet. I don't know

that could count too so we are 30 plus years but

I think my favorite memory is actually our 25th wedding

anniversary. We got remarried in Ireland, and we had all our

children with us, and we stayed at this wonderful Bed and

Breakfast. The proprietor of the bed and breakfast looked at us

and said, Are you all Catholic? And we said, Yes, we are. So she

goes, hang on just a second. She came back with this massive

bottle of Holy Water, and starts sprinkling us with holy water.

And our son tied the wedding lasso around our wrists

together, and it was a wonderful occasion for us to celebrate our

25th wedding anniversary by getting married a second time in

front of our children.

So sweet.

That's beautiful. Any Spanish so you can actually

speak Spanish?

I know. Can you tell Bill how to say it

would be,

unfortunately, in Puerto Rican

he got the job done exactly.

That's wonderful. We appreciate all three spouses

to put the work in there and come up with the questions and

allow us to actually feature them on an episode, since,

again, they do get talked about on the podcast, so it's great to

hear their voices and have them put to our post on the spot. So

we've got to bring it full circle, wrapping it up here the

final episode. Christina, this was your pick. We had an

opportunity. We invited the three founders of ATLIS to come

on the podcast to talk with us. So we had Kelsea vrooman, the co

founder and partner of mission and data, Gabe Lucas, the

founder and principal of Ed Tech recruiting and 12 M recruiting,

and Stuart Posen, the co founder and chief technology officer of

exclaim, Christina. I'm sure this meant a lot to you to get

the three of them on and talk to them about ATLIS.

It was great. And I feel like

privileged all the time to have these people in our world. There

are OG schools, member schools, that still mail their check to

Stuart. So I always get to hear from Stuart. In the fall, I just

had an interaction with Kelsea. We work with her firm, of

course, Kelsea and Ari at Mission and data, and you know,

with Gabe, we are working on the salary survey right now. So I am

so lucky to have taken the reins, which is really how I see

this from our founders and our founding staff, because ATLIS is

just a wonderful, thriving community, and I'm very pleased

that they entrusted me and our current team to take over for

the OG team. But it's so cool to have this opportunity like how

many other associations get to interview their founders? I feel

so lucky.

I picked a clip here where towards the end of

the episode, we asked the founders to look ahead into the

future to see what they thought about where Atlas is headed.

So let me ask you, where would you love to

see Atlas at 20 years? Can you picture that far out? What does

Atlas look like when we celebrate our 20th anniversary,

I'll give a softball answer, maybe, which is

fulfilling its mission. You know, if I could tell the

future, I'd be rich and living like in this huge mansion or

whatever. I don't have a crystal ball, but I feel like if Atlas

stays mission driven, and that mission adapts over time as it

needs to, I think ATLIS will be doing a okay, maybe that was too

easy political, I don't know.

Hey, I love it. You're speaking my language,

Stuart, because I think that that's right. Where it is. What

do you think, Gabe, where are we going to be? Well, I

don't know where you'll be. That's a great I wish

I knew, but I'll give you two, sort of like, potentially again,

the weed answers that maybe it will just trigger thoughts for

the community. I think we were talking about this right, as the

three of us were leaving the board, not to get way into the

weeds, but either, you know, we thought about association for

technology leadership, and I don't mean to say change your

name, but I hope in 20 years that it really is that whether

you change your name or not, certain other associations,

right, when you think Business Affairs, you might think NBOA. I

feel like heads of school should almost be going to Atlas

conferences more than tech directors, or certainly in the

same numbers. And so I hope in 20 years, there's a recognition

that this is the place for technology and beyond

technology, right? Not just the wires, but bring in the data,

bring. In the curricular innovation that is the be all,

end all, or at least the bulls eye point for technology

leadership. I guess the second thing, again, sort of a little

bit myopic, but you know, there are other associations that

accredit and I feel like I could see in 20 years, like ATLIS

being a formal accrediting partner. And again, even if it's

not the recognition that accreditation for schools needs

to change, right? It's been for decades this very backward

facing, or just voluminous in terms of, like, things that are

just really is that so important when here's like, one of your

biggest areas of your budget, one of the biggest reasons

people choose to or not to go to a school. And I just think that

could put Atlas on the map. But again, even it's not accrediting

the recognition that, like just the oversight and the governance

of technology and sort of the evaluation of schools through a

technology lens is like just as important as all the other

things that are in those big chapters, in those binders. And

I think Atlas could be driving that equation.

I'm going to lean more towards Stuart

fulfilling its mission. However. I mean, I think I do have a

dream that, you know, the generative thinking of like

framing the question for the board. So Hiram, you're you're

on the board, so maybe this is seeding your generative

discussion at a next board meeting. When I think of schools

today and when I think of the challenges that face independent

schools today, it's financial sustainability and the business

model of independent schools is just getting harder and harder

to make work with tuitions 40, $50,000 and if we want to assure

access and affordability to all students, something's got to

change. And when you look at the different types of roles within

an independent school, community, finance and

technology are the two areas where it kind of almost doesn't

make sense to go into independent schools. In those

realms, because the incomes that you can make outside of

independent schools. I'm sure Stuart, when you left

independent schools, you were making two, 3x what you made

inside of independent schools. So for me, it's like, if we're

wanting to attract and retain the best and brightest in

technology without having them go to industry, we have to do

something and doing something crazy and out there and in the

left field is what I would love to see ATLIS try to do. And you

know, so much of technology can be administered digitally and

from afar. So are there ways where you could partner schools

that have similar missions, that aren't necessarily market

competitors, and then share services, share talent, even

share platforms across space and time to make the bottom line of

technology more sustainable for schools and for Atlas to be part

of that solution, to really rethink the business model of

independent schools, to try to make it more sustainable for the

future. That's what I would love to see Atlas really just

innovating to make things work for independent schools and the

families that attend them.

And I think that we are up for that

challenge. What do you think, Hiram, are we ready to roll with

some of these great ideas?

Yeah, absolutely. I think we have a lot of

firepower on the board right now with a lot of energy and

excitement to take on the new the mantle of the next era for

ATLIS. I agree.

That was fun. I always love hearing from

them, and the idea that they still have visions and dreams

for ATLIS after all this time is really cool.

Yeah, can hear the pride and and the enthusiasm in

their voices. It's wonderful. So, Gosh, 100 episodes. We could

have gone on for hours with clips and highlights from those

episodes. Other episodes, we've had one of you as the host. I

mean, you were here from the beginning. You know, at some

point Christina reached out. What do you think about this

idea, Bill and Hiram, you said, Sure. And now, 100 episodes

later, what are your thoughts? Open question for anybody,

I would say it's still the favorite part of my

week is getting together and talking, getting to know the

people that we bring on the show. I'm still getting so much

from it, you know, I just re listened to the last episode

that we posted up. It was with Dan McGee, and just listening to

Dan, I mean, it was like, I sit there and I take notes. I took

notes as we were going through this in terms of like, oh, I

need to go back, and I need to look at that. I need to go back,

and I need to look at that, and I look forward to all these

conversations. And I hope that that inspiration for digging in

just a little bit deeper, taking those notes, trying to take

something that you've heard and apply it in your job, is

something that I'm just not getting out of this, but I think

that all of our listeners are getting out of it as well.

I never suspected the joy I get out of re

listening to the episodes. When approached to do this, I was

worried about the time commitment, because it is a lot

of work to do this. But. What has evolved over time, which I

think we do a great job emulating. About what Atlas does

is we've built this relationship that the chemistry among this

group, and I'm including you in this, Peter, because you've

become instrumental in producing these episodes, is really quite

special. I leave the ATLIS conference every year feeling

recharged. I leave these recordings feeling recharged as

well, because of the amount of respect that I have for each of

you, but also the wonderful memories that we have been

creating, the humor, the satire, the outright insults, which is

the way friends behave, and I wouldn't have had it any other

way.

It's been a blast, and I'll echo all those

sentiments and just also say that this would not be possible

without my incredible team at ATLIS. We're a small team, and

the way that they dug in to figure out how to execute this

podcast on a very regular basis has been nothing short of

incredible. Peter and a lot of the teammates on the inside

Andrea, who keeps everything moving, we've all played a role

in trying to make sure that this is a consistent, safe place for

our community. A little nugget of annual conference delivered

on a weekly basis to their podcast platform of choice, and

so I couldn't have done it without the incredible ATLIS

team. And Peter, thank you for putting together such a

memorable 100th episode. I know you worked really hard to pull

all this together, spouses and all, and I'm very grateful for

it. Thank you, Peter.

Very nice. I'm gonna add that to the Atlas

outro

that hurts.

We'll definitely do the whole video for this one

that's great. On behalf of all of our listeners, I'm sure I

speak for them when they thank the three of you for your

engaging conversation. You make it so fun and still so helpful,

so many great nuggets and words of wisdom and advice, and you

all do a fantastic job of hosting. So thank the three of

you so much for 100 episodes, and let's hear it for 100 more

and so on and so on.

Heck Yeah, cheers. Let's do it.

Happy New Year.

The links to the full episodes we cited will be

in the show notes, and as this is our final episode of 2025 to

all of you celebrating holidays this time of year, we hope you

have a festive and wonderful holiday season, and to all of

our listeners, we're grateful that you're with us. We'll

continue to crank out episodes as long as you're listening and

enjoying it. So we can't wait to resume the conversation next

year with more weekly episodes of talking technology with

ATLIS. Thank you all.

Peace. Thanks everybody. Great job.

There is one more thing I'm going to do for this

episode, but I'm not telling any of you what it is. You're going

to have to wait and listen for it. Oh, my God. Oh Lord. And

here it is, in light of this milestone, a gift for Atlas

staff, our volunteer leaders, our members, our amazing podcast

hosts, Christina, Bill and Hiram and most importantly, you our

listeners. Here is after 100 episodes of talking technology

with ATLIS, every mention of the word zombie,

Hiram and I both have a zombie addiction.

They want to talk about zombies. Was that a

zombie

reference? Bill? It might have been

bill and Hiram will probably ask

something obnoxious about zombies.

I know Christina wants us to stop talking about

this topic immediately.

Count how many times they've said zombies in

the podcast? It's a lot.

It's so many times,

yes, you are starting to like

zombies. I don't like zombies.

What would be your favorite zombie

melee weapon? The guys always want to

know what weapon you'd use to kill a zombie,

which conference venue was the absolute worst

choice when it comes to escaping a zombie event, where one to

occur at these because these are legitimate and real world

questions.

Now that we've got all the zombie

questions out of the

way, Bill, you're gonna start a zombie class. I

already have one.

Hiram, I don't understand zombie lore.

The zombies just are added bonuses, bonuses.

They're disgusting. We've been asking

about zombies and coffee drinks, and we're gonna just cut all

that off at the pass the zombie references when they start, just

nod and smile. Series A funding for

zombies. Let's go. These

guys always bring it back to the zombies,

dude. This is we got to keep this on the rails.

You can imagine getting bit by

a zombie. Let's go back to reality,

please, for the love of God, here we go.

Get to work on that zombie thing.

Or don't. It's okay. We're going to start

showing up in zombie feeds. Could we ever just record one?

Podcast out the discussion about zombies. Guys with the zombies

wouldn't be one of our podcasts without it. I'm gonna set a

timer and allow free range zombie chat.

Go zombie, zombies, zombies, zombies, zombies,

zombie zombie zombies. Zombie zombies,

zombies, zombies, zombies zombies, zombies, zombies,

zombies zombies, zombies, zombies, zombies, zombies

zombies, zombies zombies, zombies zombies, zombies,

zombies, zombies, zombies, zombies, zombies, zombies,

zombies, zombie zombies, zombies, zombie

I love the fact that Christina brings up zombies

first.

I know I can't escape it. No, zombies,

yeah, I don't want to do any close quarters combat with a

zombie. You're allowed to say zombies are dumb. Can zombies

swim?

Zombies don't swim. I'm good for the zombie

apocalypse. We can go there all

day long. Jazam, oh no. Haha. Christina, haha. Because

zombies are fake. Zombie Apocalypse, zombie apocalypse,

zombie apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, zombie apocalypse,

your favorite zombie apocalypse weapon, zombie apocalypse,

zombie apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, zombie apocalypse,

zombie apocalypse. Part of the tea list prep. Is

there anything to help us prepare for a zombie apocalypse?

Zombie Apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, zombie

apocalypse, zombie apocalypse, zombie apocalypse.

We've had all discussions zombies, grits

and everything technology bill

and Hiram start going off on zombies, the facial

expressions of Christina, the body language. Sometimes she'll

just get up and like, we don't even know where she went. Like,

she just leaves. It's gold.

Oh my gosh. You guys have a zombie. VR,

thank you, Hiram, you don't have to answer this. Ai generated

like zombie videos. Zombie aficionado, I am trying to bring

some non zombie energy into

the space zombie aficionados. This is out of

control.

General, you sent a weapon in the mail to Bill. What is wrong

with you? Oh, and it came in a zombie box.

Is this like an ATLIS membership benefit that

you get access to the zombie experience. The three of us have

been the sort of key zombie aficionados.

Please tell me you're not going to ask this woman about zombies.

Oh, Bill, she's a doctor.

Bill is one of my dearest friends. I learn

something from him every time I talk to him, despite his

obnoxious side. And suffice to say, if we were in the zombie

apocalypse Christina, there's no one else I would want to be with

them, with Bill Stites.

And that's exactly where I was gonna go. It was

gonna go right back to the zombies. If there's anyone I

would want by my side, it would be you, because I know we would

dominate the world.

We're done with zombies. I hope you had

fun. It'll never happen again to all of our listeners, I

thoroughly and sincerely apologize,

because you have your assault team, you have your

ranged weapons team, then you have your melee weapon team, and

then you have your bruisers. And this is where you would employ

your bruisers, those with bats, those with things that are going

to just golf clubs. I mean, you could use golf clubs at

that this has been talking technology with ATLIS,

produced by the Association of technology leaders in

independent schools for more information about Atlas and

Atlas membership, please visit the atlas.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. You.