In this episode, technology leaders from independent schools discuss the complexities of their evolving roles. They share insights on managing AI integration, ensuring data privacy, and developing comprehensive business continuity plans. The conversation also explores strategies for fostering strong technology departments and the importance of community and collaboration in navigating the challenges of technology leadership.

Resources

• Knowledge-ABLE: Igniting a New Generation of Lifelong Learners, book providing a framework for effective learning that extends beyond traditional education
• UpLearn, LLC, educational consulting company
• The Pingry School
• New Jersey Association of Independent Schools
• Link to episode “Christina and the Dudes”
• Skill Struck, online learning platform including “Chat for Schools”
• Resources, from National Business Officers Association (NBOA)
• Resources, from ATLIS
• ATLIS Leadership Institute
• Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (TLIS) certification
• Nick Burns, IT Guy, SNL sketch with Jimmy Fallon
• ATLIS Annual Conference 2025

Phil, 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. Kristina Lewellen,

Hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with Atlas. I'm Kristina 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, Director of Information Systems

and Academic Technology at St Christopher school in Richmond,

Virginia.

Hey, good morning, gents. How you doing?

Hello. It's cold today. It is cold. And I know that there's

been, you know, between the wildfires in California and the

weather on this side of the country, where we all are

located, lots of disruptions to learning. Did you guys miss some

school days coming off of the holiday and into the first part

of the year?

We sure did. We actually had a water crisis here

in Richmond, Virginia, where the pumps went down during that

first snowstorm, and so the city of Richmond had no water for

four days.

Yeah, when I was at the Virginia Association

of Independent Schools a couple weeks back, the talk of the town

was, Do you have water? How long did you have no water? What do

we do without water? So that cannot be a good situation. I'm

glad that you guys are restored at this point.

We are all restored, and we did go virtual

for one day, but that was all we needed. Awesome.

Jersey has been largely open and running. I

shouldn't say I laugh, but when the south gets snow and what

happens in areas where you're not accustomed

to it? Oh, Virginia is shut down. Yeah, I

can only imagine, like we are a mess right now. Yeah,

my wife's from Vermont, so she laughs at me

every time I complain about snow here. And then when we hear

about snow anywhere, kind of below Washington, DC, it's

probably the same type of thing. So, but no, we're all good.

It's awesome, though, if you're a

transplant, I mean, I've said it before on the pod. I'm from

Buffalo area, and so when it snows, I go to the gym, I go to

Costco, like, it's a good day for me, because I'm fine. I'm

good. You know

what? It's interesting, like, you're fine.

And, like, if you grew up around, it's everyone else

that's, like, moving around that you need to be, like, really

mindful of. For

the most part, they're home. They're

afraid. So if you go out in the thick of it, you're usually

pretty safe. Yeah, I think,

unfortunately, a lot of people think, because

they have four wheel drive, they can drive in anything and can't

drive

on ice. Doesn't matter.

Stay in your lane. Folks. Stay in your lane.

Well, we're gonna do that today. Stay in our lane because we had

had a podcast not long ago that we recorded just the guys and

me, and we kind of re introduced ourselves, and we're gonna drop

that one sooner rather than later. And so it's a good follow

up. I wanted to kind of stay in the lane of technology

leadership. We've been in a space with this podcast where

we've been talking a lot about Ed Tech leadership, and we've

had some really notable, incredible humans on our pod

that we I'm not even sure why we snagged them. They were good

guests for us, and we learned a whole lot. But I really want to

stay in the space of technology leadership at our schools,

because I think there's a lot going on. I think our tech

directors are feeling it like feel it all the feels in terms

of the stuff that's being juggled. And so Bill and Hiram,

I got from you guys your take on how things are going at your

schools. This week, we're going to welcome in a couple of

additional technology leaders, some of my absolute favorites. I

know that you guys feel the same way we're welcoming today.

Bradley lands. Brad is the award winning author of a book which

is pretty incredible, but also is the Chief Technology Officer

at the Langley school here in McLean, Virginia, and so

probably dealing with some snow yourself. Are you guys open

today? Brad or no,

so we are technically open, but it's a

faculty work day, and so faculty can work remotely if they need

to, but our campus is open for business. Love it,

and also welcoming from New Jersey and

one of Bill's BFFs. We'll get into that. Steve France from the

Pingree school, you're the Director of Technology at the

Pingree school. I had the opportunity to come up and visit

the Pingree school extension not long ago, which was kind of

cool. Are you guys open for business and enjoying the start

of your

year? We are. We even made it open for a day of

service yesterday, which was a little bit of a struggle. We

literally had our facilities team like plowing grass so that

we had additional parking at our extra campus. Gotta love

all these interruptions. So before we go

down the path, I am going to let you guys in. Going to let you

guys introduce yourselves a bit more and give a little bit more

of your background. You are Atlas die hards and the smiling

faces I see around every corner at the conference. So it's a

real pleasure to have you guys here, and I'll do my best to

keep bill and Hiram under control. But I never make any

warranties or promises, so my lawyer. Told me to say that,

let's start where I know it's going to go. So maybe if we do

it in the beginning, when I'm a little sharper and I can keep it

under control. Bill, you went to college with Steve.

I did if anyone's looking for the dirt, if

anyone's going to write a book, if anyone's going to do

anything, you either talk to Steve or, in particular, his

wife, who I went to school with, as well. I can actually say I've

known Steve's wife longer than Steve's known his wife. Did

you introduce them? No, that would

have been fun.

I thought Bill was gonna say Friendster or MySpace.

Could you imagine if I had that hanging over

my head? That's true. It's bad enough as

it is, Right? Steve, it

is. It definitely is. But yeah,

we went to college together at Montclair State,

many, many moons ago, and then ended up living in the same

development, which is where we bumped into one another, and

where I've originally put forth the idea of Steve coming to work

with me here, and then Kay, which is just where it all kind

of came together on the school technology side. I

love that. So Steve, let's go to your

journey first. Then since Bill kind of did the bump set there,

we now know that with an unfortunate run in in your

neighborhood, you ended up being pulled into, well, fortunate or

unfortunate, I'm not sure yet. Let's see that you got pulled

into the Independent School world, and you worked with Bill

for a while. So tell us a little bit about your background and

why did you stay? He pulled you in, and then you're still here.

So tell us your story. Well, to give it

a little context, like we ran into each other at

the video store. So just time frame, right? Like it gives you

a good timeline on this. I miss the video

store. Yeah.

Gotta love blockbuster. VHS, not DVD. Were

you kind did you rewind?

As a former video store employee, I always rewind,

Okay, excellent. I got a job, and I was working in the graphic

arts world, working on computers all the time, because, like,

anytime that a computer went down, we were down. So I learned

how to repair things very quickly. Bill got the bump to

the Director of Technology at MKA, and was looking for a new

technician. And he's like, how would you feel about working in

a school? And I was like, Yeah, I'll give that a try. That was

in 1999 so I put in 14 years under Bill's tutelage.

Shall we say that's more like a sentence,

a sentence, then you got paroled. I did Time

with Bill. I did a lot of time with Bill. Did you get out with

time served?

I'm still paying. I'm on like, some level of

probation, I guess, at this point still. But about 12 years

ago, I took a role at the Pingree school, basically a

lateral move to be a little closer to home. I had one year

old at home that I wanted to spend a lot more time with, and

basically helped Pingree launch a bunch of different initiatives

here and took over the director role almost two years ago now.

Awesome. Congratulations. Thank you.

Let's shift to Bradley for a second. Brad Tell me a little

bit about your journey, and before we get too far,

go Dukes. Yeah, go Dukes. Absolutely. I did

not graduate from I'm from New York, but my

youngest is a Duke dog at JMU, and she's pursuing accounting.

Awesome. Yeah. So I went to school at JMU, and

that's kind of how I ended up staying in the Northern Virginia

area after I got my teaching degree, but I always knew I

wanted to be a teacher. So my background is actually in

education. I started off my career as a middle school math

and science teacher, and my short story is just saying yes

pretty much to everything. It was always like yes, and so my

principal at the time asked me to step into our CTE role of

career and technical education. So I said, Sure, and you know, I

had to get certified, and I ended up teaching technology

after that. And so after that, I became an instructional

technology coach, and then got my admin degree. And I was

really passionate about technology and education, and I

just wanted to pursue that as my next career move. And so I ended

up at the Langley School, where I was the Director of Technology

and Innovation for nine years, and then most recently, two

years ago, I became the chief technology officer at the

Langley school. And so I have a unique perspective, because my

background is in education, and I have had to come a long way to

learn all about the IT side, the networking infrastructure and

Atlas has definitely helped me with that a lot. So I'm happy to

be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, thank you guys both. So I want to jump

into something, as I mentioned in our intro, I had just

recently had a conversation just the three of us, our co host

podcast, where I asked the guys a bit about what they were

seeing and feeling as tech director. And so I'd like to ask

both of you what your top priorities are right now, what

are some of the things that you're thinking about, what are

some of the projects that you're working

on at your schools? So from my perspective,

you know, AI is all the discussions and meetings that we

have, particularly with our ed tech side of the school,

figuring out what tool you. Going to use, where you're going

to go with those tools. What's the line in the sand as to where

you're allowed to use those tools, both for the students and

for the educators? So that's a big part. And then on the other

side of things, we're always keeping up with, like, you know,

the newest technology, and there's always big upgrades

happening in the school. So like, we have a full switch

replacement happening this year, which is something that, aside

from my department, nobody sees, nobody knows about. But it's an

enormous expenditure of money, and it's a lot of time, and it's

a lot of effort, and like looking at all the different

resources that are available, all the different new things on

the market, and figuring out which tool to go if we switch up

technology that we've currently been using, and what path we go

down on that front too? Yeah,

like switches and changing s is are

like the most thankless jobs, right? Because nobody really

knows all the work that goes into it. It's a massive lift,

and then at the end of the day, it's the same as yesterday,

right? To the outside world, yes, when you're looking at

tools, where would you say your line is? Are you kind of pro AI?

Are you concerned about like as a school?

So from the school, there's still a lot of

discussion happening, because there are some very strong

opinions, and there are people that are very pro tools and

figuring out great ways to use them, and we're trying to figure

out some cool ways that we can use them outside of the

classroom to show our community the power of the tools like one

of the things that we're currently doing is we're working

on putting a bot together right now that is going to contain all

the information from like our handbooks, our different

protocols within the school, how to access different resources

within the school so that instead of you having to, like,

search through a resource page within our portal, you can go to

the bot and say, you know, type in a question. It's like, you

know, how do I log into ADP? Or what is the best way for me to

change my FSA contributions? And hopefully, the bot will deliver

the correct answer, which is the other piece that we're kind of

dealing with too, you know, like we're feeding the content in. So

we, we actually did go with a product that we're still kind of

playing with and testing that puts like, kind of like guard

rails on our information, and it's not allowing all of our

school information to go out into, like, the greater engine,

right? So, you know, we're putting that box around our

information, but we're hoping that the systems will still,

like, deliver the information in an appropriate and helpful way,

because that'll be a good way to get buy in from members of our

community. Yeah,

absolutely. Steve, what is the tool that you're

using? Because this is something that I've gone down the road

with on a couple of occasions. We talked to like Hudson Harper

and other people on the pod about that, in terms of, like,

trying to figure those things out. And it's those guard rails.

It's protecting your own information, like I played with

po and a few others, you know. But again, these are largely

bots that once you make available, they're open in

public. There's not a way to contain it to just your

community, and then again, those guard rails around the actual

information that you're putting in that it's not feeding the

larger llms that are out there. So what is the tool? And how

have you thought about and talked about those pieces?

We had a task force, as most schools do. We

played with a bunch of the different education tools that

were available, and we landed on school AI as a tool that we were

going to go with. And school AI has great feature sets for

educators, and they have some great ways for them to put

together lessons and different things that they're going to

utilize the AI tools that they can just then push into our LMS

Schoology. But we're still kind of in that process where we're

playing so we've purchased school AI as like our platform

for the school, and within that, we can build our own bots, and

we can feed our own information into those systems. When

that bot is then available. Is there a way in

which you can make it so that it's only people that are at a

Pingry domain? How do you control access to that bot?

Oh, yeah. So it's, again, it's a walled garden, so

you have to have a pingree.org email address to get into the

system, and it's going through our single sign on with Google

and Brad, how about you? What are you

seeing and what are you kind of wrestling? Any cool projects on

the horizon at the Langley school.

Yeah, so with other schools AI has been a huge

initiative for us. And in addition, you know, just upping

our cyber security and looking into data privacy and security

policies such as data retention, looking at data retention

schedules, and then also developing a strong business

continuity plan has been a really big project for us.

Coming out of the pandemic, a lot of people realize that we're

moving a lot of data into the cloud, way more than we even

used to. And so schools are starting to realize how much

data we have in the cloud, and looking to come up with really

strong data retention plans and schedules to make sure. We are

being responsible and safe with that data. But I'd love to speak

a little bit about AI, because it was actually one of our

annual priorities this year. And so we had a really big

initiative moving forward with AI, and we had a task force as

well. The first thing we did was develop a policy, both for

faculty and staff, and then we created a separate policy for

students. And then after we had a policy, we were reviewing

different tools, and school AI is amazing, we ended up going

with a slightly different tool just because we thought it met

our needs a little bit better. But this one's really under the

radar. It's called Chat for schools, and it's developed by

skill struck. And there are a couple things about it that I

really like it operates very similarly to school AI and the

fact that it is domain protected, you have to log in

with Google two factor authentication, the single sign

on. Then it's limited to our domain, but it has two portions.

One portion is for the faculty and staff, or the employee side,

which actually integrates Chat, GPT, 4.0 and then the student

side actually integrates Claude, which is more designed for not

giving you direct answers, but more of the coaching, the kind

of the mentor model, which is really neat. And for teachers,

they can easily integrate their Google Classroom, rostering with

it. And then they can enroll students by integrating Google

Classroom, and they have the ability to look at all of their

students, chat log and their history. So there's a lot of

transparency that goes along with that. I think we set up all

the right moves in terms of setting everything up, security

wise, digital privacy wise, making sure that it all checks

out because, like school, AI chat for schools, allows content

to come in, but it does not go back and train the LLM, which is

really nice. And so it does have those safety features built in,

as well as content filters. And so if a student were to enter

into the chat bot, it has a series of content filters that

can actually be customized, and it can raise a little flag that

notifies the teacher or the admin if something was entered

inappropriately or dangerous. And so, you know, we have the

tech side, I think, pretty well figured out, which is great. The

hardest part is figuring out how teachers can use it responsibly

and safely and ethically with their students. And so we're

still trying to figure out what are some good ways that students

might be able to learn about the technology, and how might they

utilize it in specific use cases without them losing those

fundamental skills and without them becoming too dependent on

it. And so that's what we're still trying to figure out.

What's your buy in look like currently? So it's

been mixed, for sure. I've led a lot of

different trainings with faculty staff, and then particularly our

middle school students in seventh and eighth grade. And at

first it was very low, until they saw how powerful it was.

When we did an active training workshop, and I actually asked

them to use a template prompt, and they got to see the

reactions and the results firsthand, they were like, wow,

this is really, really powerful. And then started having

discussions such as, how might you be able to use this in your

unique role here at Langley, you know whether you're on the

business side or whether you're a teacher, right, and then

working within their department to come up with really effective

ways to add prompts to help them with their administrative tasks

that will hopefully alleviate more time for them to focus on

what really matters, You know, their students and helping our

school be successful.

So I have a follow up for both of you. I'm kind of

on that bus of wanting to have a bot here as well. Would love to

throw in all sorts of information doing so much work

in the cyber area. As Bill knows, we're very worried about

data privacy. Are any of you concerned with, God forbid

something happens where those guard rails are actually

breached. It's not a matter of, is it going to happen? It's just

a matter of when it's going to happen. I mean, we're seeing

what happened to Power School recently. We've seen what has

happened to other major players. It seems like there's so much

information out there. God forbid you're throwing in

business office plans or development plans into your bot,

and all of a sudden now it gets exposed thoughts.

It's scary. It definitely is, and that's the

thing. It's not a matter of like, if it's when it just seems

that there's security breaches happening all over the place, to

places that you think are secure, and you know you're

relying and most of the services that we're using these days are

cloud based, and you know we don't control access to the

information. And it's always going to be a concern. Yeah,

it's

definitely a concern, and I think schools

should be addressing it. What we've tried to do is build into

our policies very specific expectations and guidelines on

how our employees should actually use the tool, and so we

have constant reminders such as making sure you don't put any

private information in make sure that you don't put any sensitive

data into your prompts or to your chat bots, and making sure

that you don't enter any real per. Proprietary information

that could potentially get out there. So our system only uses

data that we input. It doesn't source any of our internal

documentation or, you know, backgrounds, documents or files

that we have. So right now, it's just the data that we enter. But

you know, if you were to think of using something like Google

Gemini in your Google workspace account, you know, Google Gemini

is supposed to be pulling all of your data that's in your Google

Drive, that's in your Gmail so that's another layer of data

privacy that you are going to have to think about, and we're

going to have to think about if we use some sort of tool that

will be integrated with all of our files and all of our data.

But right now, the current tool that we use is just based on

user input.

I think those pieces in particular around, you

know, what you decide to put in, I mean, Brad, before you went

down the road with Google, I was thinking about, you know, all

right, well, the stuff that you might put in to create these Q

and A box, it's not necessarily confidential information. It's

not necessary, but it's generally policies and

information that might not necessarily be made publicly. It

might be like something that was in a PDF that you put on your

schools, faculty or staff portals, you know, those types

of things. But when you mention what is potentially or is

happening with regard to the way in which things like Google are

looking at everything that you've got, those are definitely

those moments where you know, you kind of like, take a deep

breath, and you're like, Okay, let's really try to understand

this and figure this out. There was a post recently up on the

community board on the ATLAS website, about what's available

for Gemini and what's not and what's free and what's part of

it for education versus what you actually have to pay for and

back and forth. So it's definitely not clear. It's

definitely not easy, and it's definitely concerning in terms

of what's going on. The one thing I wanted to bring up when

it comes to school leadership is the business continuity work,

the number of conversations you and I have had around this, both

formally and informally. You know, seeing the ways in which

you've been going out and gathering all of this, I'm not

sure people are really aware of the work that you've been doing

at the school there, to really formally pull all of this stuff

together to answer a lot of those questions about, again,

you mentioned, data retention is just one of them, but all these

policies and procedural type things around the way in which

we run school, the way in which we operate, in the way in which

systems work, and what happens when those systems don't work,

is an area of leadership that I really think that you've stepped

out on, and you've really done a lot of work on, and If you can

kind of enlighten the larger community about what it is

you've been doing, because I think it's an area of leadership

in our space that we all think about and worry about, but

you've actually started to do a lot about it.

Wow. Thank you so much, Bill. I really appreciate

that it's been something that I have seen as a gap that needs to

be filled. I've been using lots of Atlas resources, which has

been super helpful. You know, looking at different cyber

security plans, looking at different data backup plans, all

kinds of templates that are in the Atlas, 360 manual, which has

been really, really helpful. But I noticed one thing that's been

really difficult to find is an actual full on business

continuity plan that involves the entire school, right? Those

other documents are within the technology department

specifically. So what's needed is really for the senior

leadership team at your school to really sit down together and

work hand in hand to develop a fully comprehensive policy that

goes through lots of different scenarios, ones that are not

just technology focused or technology related. And so I've

been the leader on our task force for our business

continuity team, and it's been really insightful, partnering

with our Director of Operations, with our director of academic

programming, and also with our Director of Communications. And

so the four of us have really been meeting once a month to

fully build out a comprehensive business continuity plan, and

we're going to eventually put that final template, or that

final version, before our head of school and our CFO, and then

we're also going to put it forward toward our broader

senior leadership team to get feedback and review. And we're

actually at the place now where we have a fully functioning

draft that we're ready to share out, and so our goal is to have

this fully completed for the next school year, for 2526

that's awesome. So it's not just for

technology, no. What are some of the weird things that you didn't

necessarily think about that ended up being in the draft that

you have right

now? There were just so many different types of

emergencies and crisis that could happen. One of them could

be a faculty member gets really injured, or it could be a threat

to your school's reputation. And so something that would really

have to involve your entire senior leadership team thinking

about what steps need to be taken first and then how. Do we

first, contain the situation, incident responses first, then

you think about business continuity second, and then

finally, third, you think about, how can you continue to resolve

this issue, reflect and try to tweak any of your current

policies so that you know how to move forward. Lots of different

things can happen in a school and creating this business

continuity plan is just so helpful, because it's like a

handbook ready to go in case anything happens. And I've

actually gotten some templates from NBOA, which has been really

helpful. They have a couple different templates that I

looked at and was like, Yeah, I think this would work for us. Or

no, this part probably isn't going to work for us. And we

took that along with Atlas resources, along with having

really positive conversations with people, and kind of

developing our own unique business continuity plan that

really addresses our schools specific needs and our action

steps in an event that's really incredible.

I'm sure that's going to be very useful.

One of the things I'm curious about is where

within that, and it was great to hear who's involved with that,

because it's not just the tech thing, right? Where did the idea

for looking at this start? Did it come from you? It did okay.

And again, how did you get the buy in to kind of get that

going? Because I think even amongst the school as a whole, I

mean, we talk about it a lot, but the school as a whole often

doesn't see it as this comprehensive need, and how did

you develop that buy? In?

Great question. So a couple years ago, we

partnered with education collaborators, right? And they

did a cyber security audit for us. And in the cyber security

audit was a category of business continuity, and at that time, we

realized we really didn't have any policies in place. We had

procedures and actions, but we really didn't have any written

policies for an incident response plan or a cyber

security breach. And so we were able to, over time, fill in

those gaps. But then one of the items was still business

continuity plan, and I was thinking, wow, this is an area

that we really need to have, you know, just for risk mitigation,

and I couldn't find any really strong resources of any

independent schools that actually had a fully functioning

business continuity plan. And so I was like, Hey, this is an

opportunity to do some real groundbreaking work here, and

I'm really excited to do it. And then once we saw that, it was a

category, our senior leadership team backed me up and said,

yeah, if this is a cyber security audit and this is a gap

that we have, you know, we fully support this. And so I asked if

I could be the task force lead on this, and our Head of School

was like, yes, absolutely, you know, don't forget to include

these people. I think this would be a really well rounded team so

that you could kind of cover all of your bases. And we started

that in September of this year, and we've been meeting once a

month ever since. And so our goal is to have a, again, a

working plan by next school year.

You need to present this at Atlas, if you

haven't done so already, exactly,

it's gonna be a great topic for future

conversation. Well done.

And again, this isn't going to be perfect,

right? This is like the first iteration. But I hope that

regardless of what our actual plan looks like, I hope that I

can talk to other people and say, This is the process that we

did. These are the steps that we took to hopefully guide some

other schools and other institutions on similar steps

that they might be able to take within their school and their

product might look completely different, right based on their

schools need, but going through the process and being able to

speak on that process, I think could be helpful. What did you

find were your biggest risks? Great question. In terms of

risks, I'm not sure, but we try to address the potential risk if

that were to happen, and so we kind of mapped out lots of

different possible scenarios, and what our response would be

for those different types of scenarios, and that included

creating an incident response team right then and there,

assigning specific roles, and then making sure that you assign

a scribe to be able to document, because you're going to have to

fill out a lot of paperwork afterwards, you know, you're

going to have to fill out a lot of forms, and you're going to

have to report but one thing that our school recently did, we

have a sub committee of our board that is our audit and risk

management committee, and our head of school actually led a

risk management conversation. And so the last year, we

actually had a spreadsheet, and we had different faculty and

staff and senior leadership team members complete this Google

form where we kind of identified risk areas at our school, and we

kind of rated them zero through 10. And so with this result, our

head of school aggregated this data, and we came up with a risk

analysis based on our own input. And so we were able to rate

every single type of event that could occur and where we thought

our current risk was, and then we were able to use that to help

form different categories that informed us on our business

continuity plan. And so a lot of them were things that could hurt

our reputation, student safety, student security, cyber

security, those were the top hits that we thought would

probably be the highest. Focused on the risk assessment. I think

this leads us well into the next topic of

conversation that I wanted to bring up anyway, and that is

that things have gotten complicated in the realm of

technology leadership in independent schools, and you

just rattled off a bunch of things that even if technology

is only one tiny piece of it, it's something we're still

thinking about, like security cameras, or whatever that might

be. So I'd love to ask both of you how you think the role of a

technology leader at an independent school has changed,

and I think that obviously it's changed a lot from 20 plus years

ago, but what about just even since the pandemic, once we all

came back from the pandemic knowing what we know now and all

the tools we acquired and everything that's happened with

AI, it has gotten a lot more complicated. How would you

characterize that shift? Even in the last five years,

we have a lot more cameras in our school. It's

actually kind of interesting. It's like the focus has changed

from just being the, you know, the people that keep the

computers running in the office, to managing security systems

throughout the school, managing print systems throughout the

school. It's like, we don't have desktop printers anywhere.

There's like, you know, copy centers that are full of copiers

that are managed by our team, but we spend a lot of time one

either just like, figuring out places where there are areas of

concern, or we're patching holes along the way where it used to

be that we spend a lot of time, just like, you know, making sure

that the day to day was kept up and running. Things have just

gotten a lot more expensive, too. It's been interesting. Our

budgets keep going up and up and up because we have just growth

around the school. Everywhere we go, our number of employees in

the school over the past like five or six years, has increased

by 15%

Yeah, that's great point, Steve. And you

know, in addition to that, our cognitive load and our hardware

load has sky rocketed as well. And what happens, unfortunately

in our department, a lot of times, is that we continue to

keep adding more devices and new software. And rarely do we get

rid of anything. And so we have to continue to learn and adapt

and be responsible for more and more equipment and more and more

online accounts. And it becomes overwhelming a lot of times. And

if you were to look at your own organization's data map, you

know how complicated that must be with all those online

services and figuring out what flows into what, you know, it

just continues to get more complex and more complex. And so

in addition to the budget, you know, it's just cognitive load

and being able to manage more and more devices and more and

more platforms every year, let alone having to learn a new

generative AI solution. You know, on top of everything, the

way technology moves so fast, it's hard to catch up, and it's

a lot of time and energy to catch up as well, while still

maintaining all of your current systems

that you have in place. When Steve was here with

me at MKA, it was great because Steve was my right hand. We

worked well off of one another. It was great because we were

able to accomplish different things now, Steve, you know, I

don't have a Steve. Steve now has an APU. And at Pingree, if

you don't know, a poo is basically Steve's. He's a

wizard. Mr. Wizard, that's where I was going to go. I call up who

when I have questions. You know, we work through those things.

And Brad, you mentioned this, you know, in terms of that

cognitive load, the sheer amount of things Steve rattled off,

like all of those different things that when Steve and I

started together, we weren't even thinking about. It was

things that didn't even resonate with us in terms of even being a

concern. And now that they are all there. And I think one of

the questions again, I'll go back to a recent survey that was

posted on the the Atlas community board about what

staffing looks like. How do you see each of you maintaining that

cognitive health around trying to learn all these things,

remaining sane? Or how have you either added or outsourced a lot

of that over time? Have your respective staffs gone

up in size as a result of this cognitive load we

have. We've added, like, a technician, slash

security technician role to the tech department. He was a member

of our facilities team, and was already running wires for us,

and he was part of, like, you know, that team. But like, you

know, anytime we needed data runs, run. He was doing that

stuff. We had him trained in terminating fiber. But like now,

like he's responsible for connecting door lock mechanisms,

putting up our security cameras all over the place. We have 300

plus cameras throughout our three campuses. We're making

sure that we have every ounce of the basically non teaching space

covered, just so that we can make sure that we have the

resources available for anything you know, like if there's an

emergency that happens in the school that we have footage that

we can direct people to the right location, because we can

actually see it live on the camera. We also use our cameras

often to help the. Kid find a misplaced laptop that they swore

was in the cafeteria and that they left it in the cafeteria,

but then we have the footage of them walking out of the

cafeteria with the laptop in their hands. Some of those

things are fun. We have, like these little detective jobs that

go on, but we expanded our team to do that. We're looking at

expanding to an additional role of like, a theater tech director

that's going to handle some of the AV needs that go on

throughout the school. Because, like, right now, my team is

responsible for, like, anytime we do a stream of something

like, we're taking care of that we don't manage the theater, but

we manage the technology within the theater. I have a knowledge

about, like, wireless microphones that I did not have

a little while ago. Like I'm literally sitting inside of our

podcast studio, there's mics and headphones all around me that

are part of a system that I didn't know about. So one of the

things that I loved about this world and this job is that it's

constantly changing, but that change has been on overdrive,

particularly since the pandemic. Yeah,

and for our school, I wouldn't say we've

added any positions, but in working with education

collaborators, we were able to partner with them to help us

rethink or restructure our technology department. And so

that was really helpful, by thinking of what our school's

needs are, and then what are the positions that make the most

sense to be able to handle the load for those needs? That's

kind of how I recently stepped into my new leadership role of

Chief Technology Officer, because we had kind of it, and

we had academic technology, but we didn't really have anyone

with oversight that would be able to kind of manage all the

technology at the school level. And so we did a technology

restructure within our department, which really, really

helped. And then last year, we started partnering with a local

MSP to offload some of our network services for our network

management, which has been really helpful, so that we could

focus more on the people interactions at our school,

helping students, helping the business office, helping our

teachers and have most of our networking needs outsourced. You

guys have come through the Atlas community

and taken advantage of a lot of resources, whether it's the

Atlas Leadership Institute or now you're both T list

certified. A big part of my role is I travel around the country.

I get into a lot of rooms with heads of school, and I try to

advocate for technology leaders and help them see how complex

this role has gotten, even to the point where T list can help

them sort out hiring challenges. Because even hiring people into

our communities is not necessarily the easiest thing to

do. How in the world do you capture in a single job

description everything that the technology leader at a school is

doing that is getting more and more difficult, and it's

definitely giving the Atlas leadership a cause for pause.

We're trying to sort through that, because succession issues

will be an issue that we deal with here in our industry in

very short order. So I'm just curious why you guys pursued

those initiatives, and do you think that it helped? Do you

think that it helped you sort all of this complexity? Yeah,

I'd be happy to share my story. So a couple

years ago, we had our network engineer decide to retire after

30 years at working in our school, and he literally built

the infrastructure from the ground up, and he contained a

lot of institutional knowledge. And so when he left, it was

really challenging trying to get all of his institutional

knowledge documented somehow for our team to be able to implement

moving forward. And so that was the main reason why we decided

to do a technology restructure at our school is really thinking

about, do we want to have another person who has all this

institutional knowledge in this one particular area? How can we

distribute some of this leadership and some of these

different tasks in a way that makes a little bit more sense?

And how do we create a succession plan moving forward?

And so that was really helpful, and I very much wanted to be a

part of this new team. And so as soon as this happened, I

actually applied for the Atlas Leadership Institute. When we

found out that our network engineer was leaving, I didn't

know what our school is going to do. All I knew was that I need

to learn more about networking and infrastructure so I can help

our school, because I was in the academic role pretty much single

handedly. And so going through that Atlas Leadership Institute

was so helpful to help me with a mentor, you know, talking one on

one, learning more about networking and IT

infrastructure, meeting with other people in the Atlas

Leadership Institute community, working on projects together.

That whole year was just amazing, because we were working

on really complex problems, collaboratively working together

and coming up with real solutions that we would be able

to implement in our own schools. And so after going through that

Atlas Leadership Institute, it kind of gave me more confidence

and more knowledge and experience to be able to take on

more responsibilities in slightly different roles that I

had before. And then finally. Me getting the T list certification

also kind of validated that I have learned so much more in the

last couple of years, and I have done a lot of professional

development. And for me, it was kind of more validation, like,

Yes, I am ready to step into this new role. I feel confident

I have that was community behind me. I have so many people I

could reach out to, whether it's resources or just having

conversations. And so it was been extraordinary going through

the Atlas leadership program itself, and then just continuing

to stay connected and looking at all the forums and the

community. And I just feel so supported. And I feel like Atlas

has really helped me to grow professionally, to help prepare

me for this role that I'm in now.

And then I couldn't agree more, it's like

the Leadership Institute was great in that it built out my

professional network 10 times what I had had, and it

distributed it from being like this small, tight group in like

the New Jersey area, to being across the country, our little

mini cohort group that I had from Within the Leadership

Institute still meets on a regular basis and has zoom

calls, even though we've been graduated since last March or

April, and just going to the conferences as well. Actually,

like, you know, all you have to do is just kind of hang around

with Bill and you're like, literally meet everyone, because

he seems to know everybody at the conferences.

I was waiting for that the mayor of Atlas,

following him around, you get exposure to a

lot of people that you wouldn't necessarily get exposure to, and

that it actually is very helpful, because then you have

those people in your back pocket when you have questions.

Yeah. I mean, we're truly a community,

and Bill is a great question asker. I mean, he even asked our

staff some questions recently about a platform that he was

curious about, and he asks the right people the right

questions, and that's part of what the Atlas community brings,

I think, is that it's a place where you can go and ask

questions and they actually know what you're talking about. We're

not enterprise, we're not a business, we're not higher ed.

There are unique circumstances to independent schools. We're

also not public. And so that brings with it some challenges

from the tech side of things, for sure,

I think that's a big piece of what you were all

saying as well, is how quickly this moves. I always laugh at

the people who will dub themselves the expert in this,

because it moves so fast, and that's what I've said all along.

I may not have the answer. I most likely don't, but I know

where to turn to ask the question to get that, Steve, I

think you alluded to it in terms of, like, just your experience

with the T list broadening out from our New Jersey group, which

is a very robust group, to that larger national community. It

just expands your repertoire and that Rolodex of people you can

turn to in ways that I think very few others have the

opportunity to do. To

go back to like, the staffing related questions,

one of the things that I've found, and one of the things

that my team does, is like, we make sure that there's overlap.

There's not one person that's just responsible for like one

thing. There are two people that have overlap in their roles to

make sure that if like somebody goes down, for the count, for

whatever reason, we have somebody who can still handle

90% of what that initial person was responsible for. But on the

other side of it, looking for like the person to fill a role

these days is like looking for that unicorn, like pulling

somebody from corporate IT, where the world is extremely

different, and the relationships with the users is very

different. There has to be like a growth plan, and just getting

like a corporate IT person up to speed on working in an

educational environment, because it's a very different world.

What do you mean? I can't use this software.

I have strong tech users, and I have less strong

tech users. Sometimes you have to hold hands a little bit more,

and you have to talk at a level that the user is going to

understand. So you know, me throwing it around a bunch of

like acronyms is not helpful, but me talking to the level of

the user is useful and helpful, and I think that's one thing

that our department does really well. You know, we have an

environment that's inviting. We have a couch, we have a coffee

table. People come sit down and we'll have discussions with us.

Sometimes they sit down a little too long, and sometimes they

discuss a little too long, but in general, it's a welcoming

environment, and we have those spaces where you can sit at a

table and work together side by side, and we can have the spaces

where you can have the conversations. And I think that

that also helps getting buy in from your community, because

like, if they feel comfortable talking to you, they're going to

ask the right questions. You're going to be able to ask them the

questions, and you're going to be able to ask for their

assistance in trying something new or doing something

differently, and they're going to be a little more receptive, I

think so.

What makes for a good technology

department, given all these things that we've been talking

about, if you were to look from the outside, in a strong tech

department, what is the characteristics of. That tech

department.

I think it has to be a yes environment more than a

no environment. I think that that is helpful in getting the

ball rolling. I think, again, having a team that is receptive

and helpful is key. You know, like, there's the old SNL skit

with the tech guy who would just, like, push you out of the

way, like, literally knock your chair over trying to get to your

computer so you can put hands on the computer. You need to let

the user do the work whenever possible. And I think that that

is helpful. And you need to have the people that can do for us,

you know, like, we don't outsource anything, all of our

infrastructure, all of our work. You know, we have APU, like Bill

had mentioned, APU is he's literally like an enterprise

risk management box in our organizational chart, because he

was a student at our school. He started the tech department at

our school, and has been a consultant at our school since

1993 and he has institutional knowledge that we can't replace,

but he shares as much as he can, and he will teach you how to do

the things that you need to do. So you need the members of the

team that are not worried about losing some rung on the ladder

because they've shown you how to do something that takes away

from like, their special skill set. It's a big part, like we

are a very collaborative group, you know, like if we have to

climb up on a ladder and help run a wire, we do that. If we

need to bring a speaker set to like a classroom because

somebody else on our team can't do it and get everything up and

running, we do it so, like you see every member of my team

doing a little bit of everything, it

reminds me of when we asked on Jeff

Dayton's episode, what's the weirdest thing that you get

asked to do as a tech director? And he said, somehow I got

involved with fixing bikes. It doesn't surprise anybody. Brad,

how would you answer that question? What do you think a

strong tech department looks like today?

Steve shared so many great things. One thing

that I always try to keep in the back of my head is that we're in

the service industry, and so having really good relationships

is really important, and doing something which I learned from

Dan Pink called up service, it's providing a better service

experience than the user would anticipate or expect. And I

think that's really important, because we're always trying to

combat the unfortunate stereotype of tech departments,

you know, being condescending or being rude. You know, did you

restart it? Did you unplug it? Did you plug it back in? And so

battling that negative stereotype every single day by

trying to provide up service, I think is really helpful. And

then the second thing is just being a lifelong learner,

knowledge and experience is one thing. People can always learn

systems. People can always learn new technology, new devices, new

programs. I think the attitude is, what's most important, it's

the mindset that you're adaptable, you're flexible, you

can always learn. And if you don't know the answer, that's

okay. We'll find a way to find the answer. It's not all about

how much knowledge you have or how many skills you have. I

think it's more about the growth mindset and being flexible and

adaptive.

Bill and Hiram, Do you guys agree with

that assessment? Does that make for a good tech department? I

think sounds pretty good.

Absolutely, 100% I just wonder where Steve got all

of his ideas from I was singing about the couches, the tables,

the coffee machine. I don't know where he would have picked

those. Jenny zagriello, oh, okay, thank you No. But I think

those are definitely those types of things. I think the one

caveat is when Steve said, try to beat the office that says yes

more often it needs to be yes with like, maybe a non verbal,

like Aster expire when you kind of say it, because you have to

really understand the level of detail to the Yes. But I think

that helps, because people expect this to be easy because

they don't know differently. It's our job to make it seem

easy without them having to feel that. Because if we want them to

really adopt and use these tools and to feel comfortable coming

in, that tone needs to be set early and often totally

agree with that bill. I mean, it's so important

for folks to feel like their ideas can be met with the

service that we can provide. Sometimes it's just a matter of

providing a little bit of the detail so that they can manage

the expectation.

Before we start wrapping up, I want to ask

Brad, you were compelled to write a book, can you tell us a

little bit about that?

Sure, it was during the pandemic I saw that

there were lots of teachers that were kind of getting out of the

profession. It was too hard, it was too daunting. There were too

many expectations of them. And I had always kind of wanted to

write a book for a long time, and I had been slowly writing a

blog, and I had been slowly collecting different quotes from

some of my favorite books, and I thought it was just the right

timing, and I. Wanted to create a book that I thought could be

uplifting, could be encouraging, but also offer some practical

strategies and advice from lots of different research and

experience that I had encountered in my profession.

And so I created a book. I did it pretty much by myself, even

though I had a lot of eyes on it that were really helpful. I did

hire a professional editor, which is, like a non negotiable.

That's something that you always have to do. But I also did

everything on a Chromebook, because that was the device that

we supplied our students with. And I wanted to prove as like a

sub goal, that I could actually write a book, a professional

book, get it on the marketplace and sell it all by using a

Chromebook. I think that was a really powerful sub goal of

mine, and I'm really proud that I was able to do it, all of my

illustrations that I did, Google Drawings, you know, my website,

that I had Google Sites, my documents, Google Docs. I did

everything from my Google Drive workspace account, and so I

thought that was really, really cool, and it was just something

I was really passionate about. It was my passion project that I

was able to eventually turn into a product. And it's something

I'm really proud of. The work that I've done, the research

that I've collected, and the conversations that I've had with

people, and I'm hoping that even if one or two people read the

book and they find one thing that was really inspirational or

one strategy that they could take away from it, then that

will truly fill my heart. So it was a fun project. Thanks for

asking.

That's awesome. So, but how I know that you came out

of the classroom versus coming out of it directly is that you

actually wrote something that someone's going to have to read.

Because if there's anything texts don't do is we never read

anything. Steve will read it when you record the audio book

version of it. There's

apps for that. You can just have aI read

it to you, I guess, right, exactly No,

but I love it. I think it's great to be able to

get that out there, to share that with everyone, and the fact

that doing it using the tools that we're trying to get

everyone to buy into, I think sends a message all unto itself,

which is fabulous.

Well, thank you guys. I appreciate you asking

about that. So

we're heading into Atlas annual

conference season, and we will be celebrating 10 years, believe

it or not, of Atlas conferences, which is kind of crazy. So my

question for all four of you is, what are you looking for this

year at the Atlas conference?

Well, Brad Lee's presentation, clearly, I know

one thing the conference always does for me,

and it doesn't have to be the 10 year, but the 10 year has a

special spot in my heart is the fact that it rejuvenates me.

It's at a time of year where the requests are coming in, end of

school activities are piling up, and you're already gearing up

for summer all at the same time, if not sooner. So it's very

cathartic for me to leave the conference and be re energized

for the weeks to come. Plus, I get some quality Stites time.

I think for me, one of the things that I'm looking

forward to this year in particular, I mean, it's nice

that it's the 10 year, the fact that it's in Atlanta, which is,

I'll just say, is easy to get into and out of, from a flight

standpoint, really has made it something that we're making an

event of here within the team. So I'm going to be bringing, I

think we have a total of, including myself, six people.

We've got our three campus ed tech folks coming. We've got our

coordinator of information systems, we've got our k8

director of stem coming and myself. So it's going to be an

opportunity to really get them out, to see what happens within

the larger community, to be able to come together as a team,

because we don't often get, you know, where three campuses

spread out all over the place, to really get together and spend

some quality time as a team as well. So it's really an

opportunity for us to build, not only our own professional

knowledge and growth, but build as a team as well. Because if

there's anything I really like to do at an atlas conference,

it's to go out and have a nice meal with everyone, to sit down

and have a nice beverage, because I think a lot of those

conversations that we have they occur in the sessions. They

occur between the sessions, but they really occur like maybe in

the morning, if you're in the gym, or if you're at night, when

you're in the lobby and you're doing all those things you get

together, or when Alex Inman throws a party for everybody and

everyone shows up, all of those things that you do, you're

building team in ways that you don't have the opportunity to do

on the day to day when we're doing school. I'm gonna see

my Atlas, like small cohort. I'll see some of

the other members of like my leadership institute, small

cohort. But I think my whole small cohort has put in to go. I

don't know if everybody's been approved just yet, but hopefully

they will be. So we always have a great time just reconnecting,

even though we do see each other almost every other week on a

zoom call, just to catch up and vent and just chat about stuff.

I also look forward to finding out the things that I don't know

that's a fun part of this, like look. Through, like the

offerings and being like, I have no idea what they're talking

about here. And like, reading a little deeper and be like, I

think I need to go to that. And those are always the fun ones,

where you can pick up some new knowledge, because again, like I

said earlier, it's always changing as much as we try to

keep up on things there. People are thinking in different ways

and thinking about things differently than you are, and

it's great to get that experience, get that

presentation, you know, under your belt, so you can kind of

bring it back to your school,

absolutely. And for me, it's just the

relationship building, extending in network, seeing people in

person. You know, we do a lot of virtual calls, and we stay

connected virtually, but just there's nothing that replaces

seeing people in person. And it's just so great to hang out

with people that, you know, meet new people. And I was just

thinking about this, it would be really fun for the 10 year to

really reflect and think about, you know, how much Atlas as an

organization, has grown in those 10 years, and then also

reflecting as what are some new challenges in technology that

our community is facing right now, and what are still some of

the challenges that haven't changed in those 10 years. And I

just love trying to problem solve when we go to these in

person conferences, whether it's like a side conversation during

a break, whether if it's at dinner, whether if it's during a

session, just talking with people always learning new

things, asking what their solutions are at their school,

and then trying to collaboratively problem solve

some things that we're all going through together. Yeah,

and I would add, I'm literally looking

forward to the vendor community being there. You guys are always

at Atlas. You understand that I always give the big speech from

the podium, which is these companies that are at Atlas

specifically are there to support and uphold independent

schools, because it's easy for them to be elsewhere. There are

bigger events, there are larger trade shows, where they can go

and spend their money and get a lot more eyeballs, which is why

I always really appreciate that they're there for our people and

our community. The vendors who come to the Atlas conference are

no joke like they're there to earn in the business, yes, but

also to be partners with independent school

technologists, and that is something that is very near and

dear to my heart. And I don't take lightly. There are some new

companies that we haven't worked with before. I think that the

reputation is sort of getting out that if you want to have a

conversation with independent school tech leaders, this is

where you go to have those conversations, and I really

value that. So I'm really proud of our vendor community for

being so supportive, and proud of our independent school

technology community for spending time with them and

making them a part of the event, rather than something separate

or an add on. They're right there with us. They're having

meals, and the vendors are taking part in the conversations

during sessions, and I just love seeing that, because I think

that we bring a better product to our students and to our

schools if we're solving problems together, like you guys

said. So guys, this has been incredible. I'm so grateful that

you guys took the time out of your days, your busy schedules,

to spend some time with us on the pod. It's long overdue. Brad

and Steve. I know we're gonna see each other shortly at the

Atlas conference, but until then, thank you so much for

being here and thanks for sharing your perspective. Feel

free to come back anytime and join us so that we can have more

conversations.

Thank you so much for having us. It was great.

Thank you So Brad, I want to let you know too. Just

as we were closing out here, I just hit purchase on Amazon, so

consider your book having one more reader, and as I read it, I

will actually record it, so Steve can actually then process

the book as well. So I'll do an audio book. The last

thing I want to hear is more me. Is you read a

book to me.

I think that would be fabulous, actually. And

then we can record your reaction to listening to Bill Stites in

your ear for the audiobook, it'd be pretty good.

Hiram and I will do it. Yaba,

David, do

alright guys. Thanks so much. Have a

great day.

This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

Independent Schools. For more information about Atlas and

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