Databus Issue: 2007 4 12/04/2007
Best Practice - Educate Your School Board
Phil Scrivano VP of Customer Services
PDF
In the education technology business, our core
customers are the students and teachers we serve
by making Internet resources available. School
administrators can focus on the need for reliability,
but often do not have the concrete information on
why we should continually fund technology.
Related to the topic of funding is an expectation
that these resources will always be 100-percent
available. Ask any user in your district when the
network last went down and you will usually get
the date, time of day and length of down time.
A constant theme I have heard from technology
departments is the lack of ongoing reliable funding
in order to provide these resources in a manner that
meets expectations.
This problem can be helped by keeping in mind
the need to educate and update your local school
boards about the importance of
providing technology resources
such as the Internet. A simple
way to put this need into words
is to annually provide a report
to the school board listing the
top 100 URLs the district used in the last week. In
addition, it is helpful to work with a curriculum
person to correlate the URLs to district curriculum
and state standards. I have made this presentation
to boards in the past and found it highly successful.
