Dan McGee, TLIS, Chief Technology Officer at Laurel School, joins the podcast to discuss why being a tech director is the best job in a school. He shares insights into his expansive role, which includes enterprise-level risk management, major construction projects, and the "archeological dig" of offboarding a long-tenured Head of School.

• Laurel School, all-girls private school in Shaker Heights, OH
• Swank, movie and TV show licensing
• Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (TLIS), ATLIS’s certification program
• ATLIS Board of Directors
• Huddle camera, wireless and wired cameras with pan, tilt, and optical zoom capabilities
• TRS-80, one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers, launched in 1977 by Tandy Corporation

Dan, 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,

Hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with ATLIS. I'm Christina Lewellen, the

President and CEO of the Association of technology

leaders in independent

schools. And I am 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.

Okay, gentlemen. Now, normally I would

start by asking how you are. However, we got on our call

today to start this podcast recording, and I can tell that

both of you are in the mix of the beginning of school, you're

looking like you're carrying some weight on your shoulders.

And so where you guys generally bring a lot of light and

happiness and energy to my world, I feel like I need to

repay the favor, so I'm going to bring the cheerleader vibes

today and try to get you in a good mood by the end of this

podcast. Do you think I can do it

perfect year? This is the highlight, the smiling

moment of my day, so I don't doubt that one whatsoever. I'm

all in. Okay. I

mean, you guys are at least game for a

great conversation, which I know we'll have. But I do know, in

all seriousness, it's been kind of a rocky couple of days

heading into the school year. You guys just have a lot coming

at you. Are you just taking it one task at a time,

trying to, trying to, that's always the big piece

of it is just trying to figure out how to get past the one

thing and on to the next, and do it in a way that works. Well,

I'm still trying to clear the inbox. Hiram told me a very

scary detail about the number of messages in his inbox. I'm

hovering in the 300 range right now, which has got me twitching.

That pales in comparison to what my friend Hiram has, which I

shudder to even think about it, Hiram, what's your number 23,000

what in the Wait a minute. Okay, that is

insane. Now I know ATLIS is a little bit advanced because of

the fact that we don't send internal emails to each other.

So if you eliminate all of my staff emails, that certainly

helps, right? But I have three unread emails right now, and I

don't even have to scroll to get to the bottom of my inbox. I can

see my entire inbox in front of me. I know this is probably

making your eye twitch, but how do you have so many.

I store everything in folders as well, and so that

count stays active based on the folders that I have, and it

just, you can't seem to swipe left enough to delete emails as

they're coming in.

There were a few days where I was, like, locked

in on a project and it would take, like a couple of hours,

and when I returned to my inbox, there were like 40 new messages

in the inbox. So you compound that with every project or thing

that you take on, and then it just builds. I would get through

them by the end of the day, and you wake up the next morning and

you've got another set of them, and within the first hour of

school, you've got another

group of them, and that doesn't include

notifications that you're receiving from systems as well.

I feel like I would burn it to the ground.

You hear about people who go on vacation and then they just

delete their entire inbox when they get back, because they

figure if it was important enough, the person would send it

again or whatever. Like, I feel like, if I had hiram's inbox, I

would probably just delete the entire thing and just start

over.

And the thing is, it's not just like a simple

response. A lot of times it's like, all right, I now need to

take 20 minutes and dig in on this one thing, to figure out

what's going on, to solve that problem, to get them the

response back, so I don't get three more emails on the same

issue within the either the next day or the next day and

a half. So when you were asking earlier how

things were going right now, I'm just trying to keep it between

the mayonnaise and the mustard as we're driving along, and I'm

going to turn on the 80s music here, and I am aspiring to love

her boy working for the weekend, because this weekend I get to

see my baby girl at Parents Weekend up in Virginia.

Tech. Nice. All right. Well, we're seeing

some rays of sunshine coming from Hiram, which is good news.

But let me also add a new layer on top of this, which is that we

have a wonderful guest with us today. We have Dan McGee. Dan,

you're a smiley guy by nature, but you in particular need to

bring it today, because I'm holding down the fort over here

with guys who have insane inboxes. So before I introduce

you, Dan, can you tell everyone how many emails are sitting

unread in your inbox?

Okay, so it's not so pretty, but not nearly to the

extent of hirams. I have 158 emails unread in my inbox right

now, which I'm twitching. Like I walked in the door today

twitching.

If we put this video online, everyone will

understand why I'm the most smiley, and Dan is the second

most Smiley. And then today, Bill and Hiram, you guys are

just toast. You're buried in your inbox. But let's set that

aside for a little bit of time, and we'll chat with Dan. Dan,

you are the chief technology officer at the Laurel School

Based in Ohio. You've been there for quite a while. You also just

joined the ATLIS board, so it's really awesome to have you in

ATLIS leadership. So how are you today, aside from those 100 plus

emails waiting for you,

aside from that, I'm doing pretty good. I'm really

happy to be here and talking with you. Great people.

Awesome. So as usual, we'll start with kind

of your journey, and have you tell our listeners a little bit

about yourself. But also, if you don't mind, could you tell us

about the

Laurel School? Yeah. So Laurel School, we're in

Shaker Heights, Ohio, right outside of Cleveland, so we have

the benefit of being in the suburban area of Cleveland, and

we have another campus that's about 17 minutes away. That's

rural, and we can get to downtown in about the same

amount of time. So we have a lot of places in the area that are

great, like our middle school today. They're all at the Rocket

Mortgage Field House, which is where the Cavs play, and there's

a big announcement coming about W NBA. So lots of excitement

there. But we are a girls school, a K through 12, and we

have boys and girls in our early childhood, so we cover a wide

variety of ages, and we really have just possibilities for

every student here at Laurel, especially in technology.

That's really amazing. And you've been

there for a while, so you've been the Chief Technology

Officer since 2012 is that when you started

there it is, yeah. So I started at Laurel after being

a technology director at another independent school, another

girls school. And I like to joke too, I have two boys, so of

course, I spend my entire career basically in girls schools, and

they can only attend for a very short time.

Yeah, too bad you can't do like an

exchange student situation with Hiram, right?

That would be pretty useful, although I think they

maybe missed me a little bit.

So what's your background been like? Were

you a teacher before you got into technology?

It's funny, I was studying to be a teacher when I

entered for my bachelor's degree. I thought, You know

what? I want to travel the world. I want to do an

international business. And I got into an economics class, and

the first day I said, this is really not for me. And my

roommate was doing the same thing, and he said the same

thing the first day. So we both declared different majors. I

became a German major with an education minor, and so I wanted

to be a German teacher or a German professor, and I decided

I went on and got a master's degree in German Studies. And

then the writing on the wall before the economic crisis, and

sort of the mid aughts was there, and programs started

closing, left and right. My program closed. I couldn't go on

and do a PhD like I thought I could. And so I thought, well, I

guess I'll go out and find a job. And there really weren't

jobs teaching German, somewhat to my surprise, after spending

six years studying all of this, and I sort of was throwing

resumes out, and I had a background in computers, so I

had worked summers for Harley Davidson dealer systems, which

is their software division, and I wrote documentation for them

on their software, and just had kind of an interesting

background there. And I thought, You know what? I've done that?

And when I was in college, I worked for the IT department

there. I'm going to try applying to some computer related jobs,

but in schools, and I came up with one and was hired. And so

the rest is kind of history. So I kind of think I'm one of the

last of the group of people the you seem good with computers,

come lead technology at our school. Like I didn't have the

formal training or degree to support it, but I had know how

and not afraid to just try. So I got into that, and then moved to

my current role after I was there for a few years. I can't

imagine doing any other job in my school like this is

secretively the best job in the school,

it was that trs 80 you played with as a youth. It

definitely was getting those floppy disks out.

And, you know, I remember saying to my dad, I was probably, I

don't know, eight, like, what is that next to the computer? Oh,

well, that's a modem. And even after you explained it, I didn't

know what it did. But, you know, now it's just a completely

different environment. But I feel like those formative

experiences really helped me tinker and play around and

figure things out.

Impressed that you had a floppy disk as opposed to

a cassette.

My brother, actually, he still programs on a Commodore

64 with a cassette. Love it like really throwback stuff. You're

kidding me? That's awesome.

No, not at all. He bought it in the 80s, the mid

80s, and still uses it to this day.

That's a whole nother conversation that I

think we probably need to go to. Maybe we need to have your

brother on the pod at some point to ask why. But in the meantime,

since you're bringing this energy about having this opinion

that tech director is the best job at a school and. Since my

friends today are feeling a little overwhelmed with all the

things they have on their plate, tell us a little bit about why

you think being the tech director is the best job at an

independent school.

Well, a double edged sword of that is you're never

bored, and that can go either way. And I think we all feel

that every year, every day is just a little bit different

lends itself to its own craziness, I think too. But I

get to see and do so many different things with so many

different people. There's so many opportunities to make a

change in the school, make a difference and make things

better. And I just love tinkering. And I think that

extends even to just the work in the school, working with my

colleagues, working with students as well. Tinkering

isn't just sitting down in a room and playing with a dei boy

or electronics.

You know, one of the things that we'll always ask

is, what encompasses your role as director of technology?

Because I know what my role was when I started, changed, and

after it changed, it changed again. I love going down and

talking to the people in our ed tech department, talking with

our librarians, but I also enjoy getting in and having

conversations with our development office or our

admissions team. So what does that look like for you there at

Laurel?

Yeah, definitely all of those groups, those are folks

that I talk to regularly, and if I don't talk to them regularly,

I realize, oh, I need to go visit them. I haven't talked to

them in a while, but really it's so many things. Hiram Bill, you

guys have been at your schools longer than I have, and I've

been here 14 years. So you can imagine the things that have

been collected on my plate and things that have been added just

by my longevity at the school. One thing that I've been in

charge of and worked with heavily is like risk management

in the school, which is not an easy topic, really, and it's a

wide topic. So that's something that you wouldn't necessarily

see in this role, but I think it relates, because there's so much

about it, and a lot of it's really project management, which

I think is a necessary skill that all of us need to have in

technology, but in management and leadership roles. So that's

kind of an outlier. We're building a new building at our

other campus right now, the one where I'm not at at this moment,

and so managing that project is like a second job, or like a

part time job. So that is something that comes around.

It's not every day in the life of our school, but when it's

ongoing, it becomes something that's really key to my day to

day work, working with teachers in every capacity, working with

parents. You know, if you take a project like we've just rolled

out a new attendance system, and when you look at that, that

touches on parents, students, teachers, admin assistants,

division directors, all of those people combined, that's a huge

number of people that in our school. That's well over 1000

1500 people when you include students and parents. So really

working with all of those different people, you have to

manage that and manage the relationships, just as much as

you're managing the software and the questions that come up, and

that really contributes to the excitement at the beginning of

the school year. I must say,

you mentioned risk management that takes a variety

of different forms in independent schools under that

hat of yours. Does that extend beyond cybersecurity?

Yeah, it does. So what I've done is I've developed

a dashboard that really is a Google Sheet, and it has tabs

for things like governance, the reputation of the school finance

HR, just to name a few, I think there are eight total

categories, including technology and cybersecurity, but it

encompasses all of those. So I'm part of the audit and risk

committee of the board, and my job, and my role in doing that,

is keeping track of this and presenting the information to

the board and helping them review in their capacity as

board members and make sure that the school is managing risk

successfully. And we've been able to do that. It's been a

process, probably over the past seven or eight years since I've

been working on this, and really all the time it's just

tightening it and getting back to it, because I think we're

managing risk every day, at least in our roles as tech

leaders and other leaders in the school. We may not realize it,

but we're doing it. And then when you get back to the

dashboard and it's time to evaluate what's there, you see

that scope. And so it's really key to keep that front of mind

and making sure that everybody knows what's happening in terms

of how we're managing risk in the school.

So Dan, I'm really fascinated that you have that

many tabs for risk. I'm curious is the appetite for risk

variable across each of those areas, because there's a certain

level of risk that you say the school. Role is willing to

assume. But how about each of those different areas?

I think it depends on a lot of things. So it depends

kind of on who is in the seat for those roles, whether it's

the HR director looking at HR risk, the CFO looking at

financial risk. Sometimes it's dependent on their role,

sometimes it's dependent on their personality, and sometimes

it's dependent on the makeup of the board. If you have a lot of

lawyers on the board, they may be a little more risk averse.

And I think over the time period of looking at risk within the

school, we've seen it shift a little bit and focuses naturally

shift. So I think right now we're focusing a lot on changes

in leadership. We have a new head of school, and so with that

presents opportunities and possible risks, so we have to

maintain the good reputations that we've had and kind of grow

with that.

Dan, I want to drill in on that last piece,

just really quickly, because when you talk about all the

different areas of risk, I'm curious as to how you as the

tech director, are assisting with this, because I think this

might fall in the communications area, and I'm just curious of it

is the reputational risk piece. How are you assisting with that

piece of it at the school? Because the other areas, I kind

of got a good mental picture of what that might look like. I'm

wondering what that means. And what do from a reputational

sense?

That's a great question. I'm not doing anything

specifically on the reputation side of it. I'm really the

arbiter of the dashboard. So we'll get together at a

leadership meeting and say, Okay, those of you in these

different roles, it's time for us to sit and spend 3045,

minutes looking at the risks. And then we set the clock, and

we go, so I'm really just the cheerleader and the person that

surfaces it up to that group. And then the individuals then

take on their own components of it. And then if there's

tightening within the sheet, if we need clarification, I'll put

a comment on it and say, Hey, so and so. What do you think about

this, or can you finish this? Can you fix this? So I'm glad I

don't have to bear all of that, because that would be way too

much for me to do. But really it's the project management

piece where I come into play, keeping it organized.

In particular, one issue that we

talk a lot about with safety, security oversight project

management is in the realm of off boarding and onboarding, and

how those systems are really important in a school situation,

both on the student population, the leadership team, the

faculty, but you also have some experience with Head of School,

onboarding, off boarding. Tell us a little

bit about that. That's right. Yes. So our Head

of School, Anne Klotz, was here for 21 years, which is a long

time for a head of school. And so she retired this summer, and

we welcomed a new head of school, Christina Breen, to our

school in July. And so managing a head of school transition is

sort of the granddaddy of onboarding and off boarding, you

have somebody who holds so much institutional knowledge, so much

information, so many different roles, especially when you look

at that risk management dashboard, they are involved in

all of those pieces, in a level that I'm not. And so it presents

its own challenges, its own risks, its own complexities. And

you know, when you have a head of school who's been in that

role for 21 years, more than 20 years, you have so much that has

changed in technology over that time period. And so as you're

working to off board that person in that role, it's like being an

archeologist. You're going down through the rock and the

different layers of technology and the things that they've

collected and amassed in their time, and you're sifting through

it, and you have to play sort of a game with that. There's so

much in there. I didn't realize how much would be involved. It

was my first, and probably not my last off boarding of ahead of

school, but there were a lot of things that I had to learn along

the way

that's really interesting and quite

complicated. I'm sure I could imagine. The same could be said

about transitioning a tech leader. We should talk to Jeff

Dayton, our colleague on the board, because he just retired

after a long time and just even off boarding himself, probably

was quite a project, right?

I think about that too. Like when I first started

at my job, everything is sort of personality dependent in

figuring out things and what is left for you. And nobody wants

to think all the time on their job. How do I need to leave this

for somebody else? But you kind of have to on a certain level in

order to make sure you're doing a service to your school,

yourself and your legacy.

Absolutely, we talk about that a lot around

ATLIS, business continuity planning is how we kind of frame

that up, you know, talking about coming in as the last of this

group of like, Hey, you're good with tech lead our tech

strategy. G at our school, right? So you're part of that OG

crew. I think part of what that did for you, good or bad, is

that it pulled you into our T list item writing, because you

do have a breadth of knowledge in a lot of different realms, as

what I call the unicorn. I think Hiram and Bill refer to you guys

as the OGs. I say unicorn. We brought together unicorns to

help write the technology leader in independent school

certification program. You were among the first people to obtain

that certification. You helped us write it. Tell us why you got

involved in that and what that experience has been like for

you.

So I think in our schools, nobody knows what we

do, even people in our department, sometimes we don't

know what we do, right? Our head of school doesn't know. And if

we disappear, how are we? They going to find somebody? And this

is not saying that what we do is irreplaceable, but it's hard to

find somebody who has the capacity to come in and figure

this stuff out. So that was really sort of the reason for my

existence in tlis, is adding my voice to this super wide ranging

conversation of what is the technology leader in an

independent school and what makes them successful? I think

I've been fairly successful. Obviously, we make mistakes,

right? But I've been able to figure it out, or I wouldn't be

here still. And it is such a wide ranging job, it's changed

so much, really. I mean, even in my 14 years here at Laurel, the

things that we do on a day to day basis are completely

different than what we did in 2012 and they're completely

different than what we did in 2020 and so I think that makes

it that much more important to be able to assess what people

know and say there is a standard really. Even though independent

schools can be a cottage industry, there are things that

are common among those roles. If it's not a dictionary, it's a

thesaurus, helping you to find what it is,

and those roles, I think, have gotten more

complicated. I mean, certainly since the pandemic, I really

feel like T list had a certain halo effect, or this perfect

timing. It was very fortuitous that the T list program, the

funding from EE Ford, it all sort of was born out of this

additional layer of complication. They got

sandwiched on top of everything that you guys were already doing

in a normal school situation. So then here comes covid, and then

everything after covid, and now we're in this realm of AI. So

that role, I think, continues to get more complicated, is that

your experience?

Oh, definitely, yeah, I mean 2020, was where we really

put the foot in the accelerator, and I don't think we've lifted

it since then. And not only that, we've been adding to it.

So you mentioned AI, that's something that's really just

been added to our slate, and nothing else has really come off

of it. And so that's been a big, big, big focus you can't

understate or overstate, really, the role of AI. It's super huge

in our schools, and it's something that we have to be

involved in, and we have to be really on top of so many other

topics that are coming our way in our schools, because people

look to us as experts, inside experts, especially

so all three of you, what could come off the

plate? How can you slow this down? I know you all feel it.

What are the solutions? I mean, I'm trying to stump you a little

bit on purpose, being slightly provocative with my question.

But like, if somebody wanted to make this better, if your

leadership teams wanted to make it better, what could make it

better? What could slow it down? I think

what's interesting. I'm actually kind

of having these conversations right now, and I think it's a

Christopher, it's fair to say, we need an extra body. Sometimes

it's something as simple as an FTE. And then I think as

schools, there's always a tendency to be shrewd and say,

Well, can we get away with a part time person versus a full

time person? And I think when you're dealing with some of the

topics that Dan has already mentioned, like risk mitigation,

onboarding, off boarding, you're talking about a lot of sensitive

information, and it's very different than, say, a help desk

technician, where they're not necessarily dealing with some of

the domains that our roles are dealing with on a regular basis

that have risk associated with them. You need somebody who is

judicious. You need somebody who has a keen understanding about

sensitive information,

a unicorn. You need a unicorn. Yeah,

and so it's not somebody that you can also get

for $20 an hour or $25 an hour, you need somebody who can

actually serve in this capacity to be a true sounding board for

you as a tech director, so that you can say, hey, what do you

think about this? Let's execute this together and do a little

bit more cross pollination. Because what I think all of us

are experiencing. In this space is the best schools do cross

pollinate, but most of us are still very siloed, and even

using Dan's best approach of trying to create that legacy for

the next person, that's a lot of work.

The other thing that I think is problematic, I'm

going to say here at MKA, but is, I think, indicative of a

number of independent schools, is we're additive in a lot of

ways, and very little gets taken off of anyone's plate. I think

it's a systemic problem.

Bill, I dare say, What was the last thing that got

taken off your plate?

I don't even know that's the rub. You think about

it and like it was like, oh, you know, as soon as copiers got on

the network, that was it, as soon as phones went off of a

local PBX and went into the cloud, that got added in

the lighting system, 100%

I mean, it's unbelievable. And the lighting

system, I mean, I spent an hour on a call yesterday looking at a

Lutron lighting control system and having to figure out, like,

where all of that plugged in? Because, Dan, as you mentioned,

you know, you take on construction, right? There's

another language you talk about, languages, German, you know, you

got to learn the language. You got to learn all these

languages. I spend half the time in these construction meetings

googling what they're absolutely saying, because I don't know the

acronyms. I know what it's like to sit on another side of the

conversation with all of us, on the IT side of things that are

like, What are they talking about with all these different

acronyms? You know, go to a construction meeting, and that's

exactly what that's like. So it's very hard to think about

the things that can come off your plate due to what I'll say

are the ongoing complexities of them. But something that you

mentioned around the work that you're doing with your

librarians, I find us spending a lot of time talking with those

tech or ed tech adjacent areas of the school. If there is an

area where some of that work can be picked up, it's in those

overlap areas, and where I think about that, particularly visa

vie our librarians, is when we start talking about the research

cycle, and we start thinking about the ways in which our

librarians, our media specialists, work with our

students and our faculty on research and what that means,

and I think about the research cycle and the way in which

technology informs that cycle, that's the single best place. I

think we've gone for a true partnership and a way of not

offloading, but a way of sharing the burden of how are we going

to deliver on all of those things when we talk about the

portrait of a student, what they look like when they graduate?

Where does that and how does that happen in a schedule that

is constantly losing time in schools? How do we do that? We

do that through the librarians. And that's been one of the

single biggest places where I've been thankful for a partnership.

Yeah, I think the more holistic education you can

provide, which is what you should provide, the more complex

it's going to get. So Bill, you mentioned the librarians, like

two things that are really big topics with us right now.

Obviously, AI, our librarians are deep in that, especially in

our middle and upper schools. And my librarian in middle and

upper she said, I don't know that I should be on the AI

committee, because I don't always agree that it's the best

solution. And I said, That's exactly why you should be on the

AI committee, because you need to be that voice in the room

that's questioning it and working it in terms of research

and where it's appropriate. And then a conversation this morning

that we had, you know, copyright is not keeping up at all with

our current digital environment and streaming and things like

that. So we've blocked all movie streaming because we know that

those services don't align with what we can show in our school

environment. But we use an external service. We use swank

for that which has 45 46,000 titles until it doesn't have

what we want, and then we have to examine with the librarian,

with the teacher, why they can't show this thing on Amazon Prime

that's really, really cool, integrates with what they're

talking about in class, but we also can't run afoul of these

copyright agreements and these use policies, and that's All

Time. That was a 30 minute conversation this morning where,

I mean, it's a risk management conversation, I suppose, too,

right? Everything comes back to each other. At some point. I was

telling a teacher the other day. I think my job is kind of like a

Seinfeld episode. You can't tell the whole run from start to

finish of a Seinfeld episode unless you tell the whole

episode, right? Everything comes back to each other at one point,

it seems. And I think everything just gets a little trickier and

a little murkier as we dig deeper and deeper

Dan. What's interesting is you use the term

murky, and I think this has been the challenge even within ATLIS,

defining. What it is to be a tech director, because it varies

so much from school to school. When you're hiring a CFO, you

know what you're getting when you're hiring an HR person? You

know what you're getting, an athletic director? You know what

you're getting a physics teacher? You know what you're

getting. The unicorn example that Christina mentioned earlier

is so incredibly apropos, because it's dependent on school

size, it's dependent on funding. It's Do you have managed

services all these different pieces and parts? And I found it

fascinating when you said, I don't know what you do. When

somebody asks that question, and whose job is that, to try and

provide the agency for tech directors. Do you think

I mean, at some respect, it's us in the job.

We're hired and we're trusted to know what needs to be done, and

we get the job done. And it kind of goes back to that cartoon

that I saw a long time ago, where, when everything's going

right, what do we pay you for? When everything's going wrong,

what do we pay you for so you almost can't win, but you can

win all the time too, right? And so as long as you have that

trust in that relationship, like with your head of school, with

your other leaders in the school, then things are moving

in the right direction. Things can get off the rails, I think,

pretty easily, pretty quickly, but hopefully the work is

visible, and if it's not the things that aren't breaking and

the things that are running smoothly, people just understand

that's part and parcel to the job too. What do you

think you would say to someone who would

want to come into a role like this, Dan, like if someone

approaches you, let's say, at an ATLIS event or another industry

event, and says, you know, I'm thinking about trying to be a

tech director. I want to be a CIO, a CTO at an independent

school. What is your advice in terms of mapping that, in terms

of being ready to be the unicorn? How could somebody

prepare for that when your job is so big and it's like trying

to catch smoke in a lot of ways?

Yeah, it really is like trying to catch smoke. You

know, I had somebody who hired me in my first school and I

probably wouldn't have hired myself, to be perfectly honest.

I don't think that I would have. I'm glad that I was hired. But

if somebody came to me and said, You know, I'm thinking about a

role like yours, you have to look at it in a balance. What is

your experience, and that's wide ranges of experience. And then

what's your attitude and your aptitude? Whenever I'm making a

hire, I really am looking for those things, but especially

attitude and aptitude. In an independent school, you have to

have certain habits of mind, a certain kind of attitude, to

work in that environment, because it's not always the

easiest place. A lot of times it's the most fun, but you have

to be able to roll with things right, and be adaptable and

aptitude also, because the things that I know now I didn't

know a year ago, or five years ago, 10 years ago, and you have

to be able to be adaptable and have the aptitude to learn. And

if I don't know the answer, I know exactly where I'm going.

I'm talking to one of you. I'm talking to somebody in the ATLIS

community. I'm finding somebody definitely who knows the answer,

and you have to have that network too. So I think if that

person came to me, I'd say, Well, if you don't have that

network, I'm helping you start that right

now. That's really interesting. And I if I

can go back to the attitude place, I think that we're seeing

a lot of burnout, not just among faculty, but among

administrators as well. But it's got to be hard for you guys to

be around faculty all the time, because a lot of them are

feeling the weight of the world. So do you have advice for either

your own tech team or for just tech leaders in general? Because

it's infectious, right? Like you pick up on the energy of people

around you, and if the faculty, the admin, the heads of school,

oh, that job, forget it like that's insane, right? So how is

it that you keep smiling when the people around you are

carrying a lot of stress.

I mean, it's a balance. It's really hard to

keep things in balance. I think the low point for just about

everybody was that return to school at the very first part of

the pandemic. I remember coming to school, sitting in my office,

basically, with the door closed most of the day, having meetings

on zoom with people in the school, people just like tearing

up and being emotional about the whole situation, and if we see

that as a low point, I guess everything might be easier. But

really, I think the most important thing that keeps me

afloat, mentally and my colleagues as well, is just

having a good community around you and having people who you

can trust to lean on and support you. And I know in my

department, we have that my most recent hire was two years ago,

and the one that I hired before that was 2017 on the tech side.

So we have people who have a long time in my department, long

standing relationship. Relationships and a deep bench

of experience in independent schools like Hiram, you

mentioned those Help Desk roles, like my person in the Help Desk

role, he's worked as long as I have in independent schools. And

I think one of the benefits that's kind of helped me in

terms of centering like my own ethos, my own mood, is being

able to lean on those people who maybe they had a less senior

role originally, but their longevity in that role has sort

of bumped them up and allowed them to level up. But also me,

so I think that becomes visible, and I think the small wins that

you get, either personally or as a team, are very helpful. I

remember we had a teacher who left a couple years ago, and

when he left, he said, I've worked in a few schools. I've

never encountered a team like yours who've been so helpful and

so on top of things, what we need to do. You know, not

everything's perfect, but it's moments like that where you can

sense the trust and it feels good, especially when you have

like those low days where just everything you touch seems to

break or take three hours to do

absolutely Dan, I'd like to pivot a little bit

so you are new to the board and you have experienced your first

board retreat. What excites you most about your potential career

here on the board with ATLIS.

I mean, I know it's got to be the AX

throwing, right?

I was going to say the opposite. It's not the AX

throwing, because I was absolutely terrible at that,

although that was a lot of fun. You have some potential, yeah?

Well, we have our first Governance Committee meeting

this week, and I'm really excited about that, because I

see that as kind of a direct relationship to the work that I

do in the school. I'm definitely able to see how that

professional development that I'll be gaining through that

role with ATLIS is going to help me come back to Laurel and say,

Hey everybody, I've learned these strategies, and we can use

this right away, because I think it's important to be inward and

outwardly reflective, look and see what others are doing,

whether it's the ATLIS board, whether it's other schools and

really that opportunity, you can't put a price tag on that,

like I don't need to go and get another Master's degree or an

MBA. I just need to talk to everybody on this podcast, or

everybody who's listening to this podcast, because I'll be

able to learn so much. So I think the learning is really

what is key and what really is exciting about jumping into the

ATLIS board,

the service is the best professional development.

You'll get serving on a board as someone who is new to the board

this year as well. Last night, we had our first finance and

Facilities Committee Meeting of our board, and I've served on

that committee, on the facility side of it for quite a while,

but with ATLIS, I'll be serving on the Finance Committee, and

it's always been one of those black box areas where I'm like,

I kind of get it, but not really. And, you know, by the

time I'm at the board meeting, a lot of the discussions have

already been had, you know, in a lot of those areas. So I'm very

eager and interested for much of the same way that you're talking

about from a governance perspective, getting in and

being able to do the work a little bit more. I think it just

will help inform all of us. So it's my long winded way of

saying, if you think about serving, if you're interested in

serving, do it, because you'll get more out of it than you

could have ever

imagined, I think too a testament to Christina, the

board, everybody ATLIS staff, here's a little call back right

the onboarding for the board. I went to our executive assistant

to the head, and said, ATLIS has it figured out if we need to ask

anything about tech setup, those kinds of things, I know where I

can direct you and we can learn a lot. So that was really,

really great to see. And I mean, obviously this is a tech

bleeding edge organization, I would expect nothing less,

right? But it's there all of that stuff and more.

Well, thank you for that. And also, I mean,

a big part of that is that I not only report to a board as a CEO,

but I serve on boards, and I think that it makes me a better

leader in a staff capacity, because I've served on great

boards with healthy cultures and really buttoned up

communication, and I've served on really unhealthy boards with

terrible cultures, you know, and so it's important to me to

experience those, because then I can kind of bring that to the

table. So appreciate you saying that. So I have a question for

you about AI, and in particular, your background with language.

Obviously, there's a lot of advancement in the realm of

language, and for those immediate translations, we've

had the Google Translate plug in on our websites for a while and

things like that. But now there's actual tools that are

growing in popularity. They're being embedded into the other

tools we already use, let alone. You could just go to chat, GPT,

or whatever bot you prefer, and ask it to translate something so

especially as we talk about the need for a human and humanness

compared to the speed and efficiency and accessibility of

AI, where do you fall on the spectrum? Dan, like, do you feel

like you know your degree in German? I doubt you would do

that today. I doubt many kids will do that. Or do you think

I'm wrong? Do you think that there's still that human in the

loop, piece of it, that an AI bot or an automatic translating

technology is going to just not get right? It's pretty

impressive when you see some of these things where you know,

you'll upload a YouTube video, and you're speaking in English,

and then suddenly you the AI bot version of you is speaking

another language that you don't know. So it's moving quickly. So

I'm just curious what you think about all that.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know, honestly, if I had it to

do over again, if I would study German, but I also teach

computer science at the school, I don't know if I study computer

science either, which might be like a sinful thing to say, but

I've had ai do things for me, from a programming perspective,

that would have taken me months to do, and it's just like out of

the box a day later, good to go, ready to use. So I think the key

in that, though, is I knew kind of what I was doing, what I

needed. I knew how to interpret what it was giving me. And that

makes the human aspect, the human component, that much more

important. And kind of looping back to librarians, we think

about when the internet came out in force in schools and online

databases, you know, even think back to when Encarta was on like

a CD ROM, right? That didn't mean that a kid could just sit

there at a computer and look up something and then just be done

with it. They still need somebody who can explain it to

them. And AI is like a step forward with that, but it's

almost like an overeager teaching assistant, they're

going to be a yes man, yes woman, whatever, and kind of

just affirm whatever you already believe. So that makes it that

much more important again, for a human to be in the mix, and a

human that maybe is a little bit smarter than you or just a

little more seasoned than you, like I had a teacher in high

school that said, study with somebody smarter than you. I

think that applies in so many aspects of life, but it

definitely also applies here with AI, can you

tell us a little bit about where your

school stands? Yeah.

So personally, I'm never like an absolutist. I'm

more a pragmatist, middle of the road, and we jumped into AI, at

least in like a sandbox II kind of way, pretty early on. But we

didn't move super quickly to adopt tools. We wanted people to

really try things out. And I think that's really in the ethos

and the spirit of an independent school. Teachers and students

come to our schools because they want something different. They

want something more personalized, tailored to them.

And if we just sign on to a one size fits all box, basically,

that doesn't really fit with that. And I was just talking

with someone in the school earlier today, and I said, you

know, I'm really glad we didn't sign on with XYZ tool a couple

years ago, because I'm sure right now it would be in the Ed

Tech graveyard. So we have to be really measured and careful, and

that's what we've been doing, letting people try things out,

giving them some guidelines. Policies can be great, but I

don't think people ever read them. If you just tweak that

word and say, guidelines, I think it becomes much more

workable and much more helpful to kind of show people the path

and give them some possibilities. Like I had a

teacher come up to me yesterday and say, Okay, what was that

tool that you showed me right at the beginning of school during

meetings? And I said, Oh, it was Google's notebook, LM. And she

said I gave it a task that I thought it could never do. It

did it better than I could do and better than I thought it

could. And so I think that too shows that's kind of our

approach. Let people go there, try it out, and they're going to

learn more by doing it, and they're going to see the benefit

of it more than if I say this is a great thing, because I say it

often, I had a committee working with me this summer, committee

of teachers working on AI and I said, this is not the Dan group.

This is the AI group. And we're all talking about these things.

I'll bring you things to discuss, learn and talk about,

but I'm not dominating this conversation, because that's not

helpful for anybody, because we don't want this to be

personality dependent.

Dan, do you have a student AI group or club?

We don't yet. That's something we definitely want to

do this year. We talked about that this summer. I think it's

really interesting, like when we've had conversations with

students about AI. So I mentioned I teach computer

science. Clients, I actually showed Google's notebook, LM, to

my students. I just gave them a test yesterday on their first

unit, and I said, Here's notebook. Lm, I loaded up all of

my slide decks, my lesson plans, all my materials for that unit,

and I gave it to them. And that kind of freaked them out a

little bit. Surprisingly, I turned on the little podcast

thing that it makes it's not going to put this podcast out of

business, but it's pretty good, right? They were freaked out by

it. Then there's even a video summary. Now that's relatively

new, and I think their sort of reticence about it is really

refreshing, and gives me hope that they're not just going to

sign on to these things and not think about it and think about

how it fits in their life.

Dan, we're at the beginning of a school

year. What is on tap for you this school year? Are you

looking forward to anything? Any big projects you're tackling?

Yeah, right now we're working through a network

project that just didn't get completed over the summer.

Sometimes it happens, we're replacing all of our switches in

our campus here in Shaker Heights, and that's a big,

ongoing project. The weird thing about it, as complex as it is

now, it's a little bit easier in some ways than it was five years

ago, two years ago, 15 years ago, and things are just a

little bit more plug and play, easy to use. That's a big

project. We're looking at our Wi Fi in general too. So relating

to the network, we're going to kick off a survey soon doing a

heat map of our school to make sure that we've got coverage set

the way it needs to be. And the terrifying aspect of that is

we're going to be looking at outside Wi Fi, exterior Wi Fi.

So we might need to hold a support group for me soon on

that, because that is a big topic.

Dan, let me tell you, if you need anyone to talk

to that was my past two summers, happy to jump on a call off of

the pod. That would be great and talk through all of this,

because there is a lot to all of it, for sure.

Yeah, same here we have places, especially because

of all the streaming of athletic events in the various locations

on campus,

I found out we got a huddle camera yesterday, or

actually this morning. I said, Oh, that's new. What's that

power cable from? That's from our Hudson camera. Oh, okay,

cool. I didn't know about that.

Watch that throughput on your internet

connection. It's a resource hog.

It's great. How you find out about those things, not

that you were involved in the conversation, not that you were

discussed or consulted. It's like, oh, yeah, we got one of

these, or we have three of them. How are we gonna, you know,

like, yeah,

like, how do we get this to work? Wait, get what to

work. Yeah, the other big project, we're upping our

bandwidth to five gigs, so that will be a big improvement. Wow,

either this week or next week, jealous, it'll be really nice.

And it was cheaper than what we had before, which was really

something we're

gonna have to put that video up because

Hiram and Bill's reactions. Are you guys jealous? You want Dan's

bandwidth?

100% sure. Why not stream everything 4k

I'll tell you offline how much it costs, and you'd be

surprised

see all you need to get these guys in a

better mood is just a little pod therapy.

Sounds like a candle scent pod

therapy, I'm not sure I want to know what

your candle scent would be. I

don't want to smell that scent. It might smell like

whiskey, is all I'm saying. Probably smell like a chai latte

at this point of the year, it would just smell like

sweat and tears, maybe

smells like despair.

Well, my three unicorns. Thank you so

much, Dan. Thanks for being a part of the pod. It was great to

have you on and great to get to know a little bit more about

you. We love that you've joined the ATLIS board, so I know we'll

be spending some time together, and hope you've already reviewed

your agenda for the Governance Committee meeting. That's my

homework assignment to you. Absolutely awesome. Thank you so

much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Thanks. It was awesome to be here with all of

you.

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

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