One of the biggest hurdles any decision-maker in education has to face is the budget. Striking a balance between maintaining costs and providing the tools students and teachers need to be successful can be daunting, but it is not impossible.
Here we speak with Caroline Lightfoot, CTO of Dickinson ISD in Texas, about her efforts to build equity within her 12,000-student district by providing proper tools and programs to all schools and utilizing Schoology for blending learning.
Lightfoot was recently recognized as Most Innovative CTO at a Tech & Learning Regional Leadership Summit with an Innovative Leader Award.
Upgrades Across The Board
Some days it can seem impossible to keep up with the tools that will make the greatest impact on education. However, by organizing your resources to provide proper tools and programs to every student and teacher within a district (regardless of how old the campus is), all can enjoy the same levels of education. Lightfoot explains how she approached this goal in her own district.
“We have a tendency to fund our new campuses for technology, and they are able to get the latest, greatest tech,” says Lightfoot. “So when I became the executive director of our department, we really wanted to start getting that out to all campuses and not just our new buildings. So we looked at the age of devices and where the work orders were and we started pecking away at it from there.”
Lightfoot and her team were able to update half the campuses last year, and plan to have everyone on board by February, with the exception of a few teachers at the high school.
Why was it so important to make this shift within the district?
“All of our teachers deserve the latest, greatest technology,” Lightfoot says. “Also, we have a little bit of a push because we have many older desktops that are not compatible with the systems we replaced. We needed to replace those anyway. This was a great opportunity to be able to do that and get some more portable, brighter technology in our classrooms.”
Challenges of Updating Tech
Taking on challenges comes with the territory when education is involved. Lightfoot experienced her own obstacles in reworking her district’s technology.
“We are in Texas,” Lightfoot says. “And, like many districts I know around the nation, we’re in that education funding crisis. We have to get pretty creative with some funding. So we funded at first with our technology budget, but we also asked [for money from the federal programs] to help with our teachers.”
The challenge then becomes spending the money to best support learning goals.
“Like so many other districts, we’ve been moving toward that blended learning model,” Lightfoot says. “We’re definitely there, but Schoology happens to be our learning management system of choice here in Dickinson. We’ve got lots of procedures in place to make things easier for teachers. After COVID, people were on board with online learning. It’s really been great to see them grow and thrive and integrate different tools within Schoology that we have in our district here as well.”
A Focus on Equity
Ideally, all schools, teachers, and students should have access to the same tools and programs to provide the same level of education across the board. Many districts struggle with maintaining a level of equity that would empower these goals.
“It’s just making a point that [achieving equity] is what needs to happen, and getting all the people in your district on board with it,” says Lightfoot. “It’s time that all educators realize that there are occasional funding things that get in the way, but we’ve been able to standardize on equipment as well so that things aren’t as hodgepodge. It makes things easier and more efficient.”
Bringing equity to a school district doesn’t always mean breaking the budget to put the latest technology in your schools, but having the mindset that you want to elevate the schools in your district equally can help advance the tech you have while not breaking the established budget. It also means that getting everyone in your district on the same page can make a big difference in agreeing on how to move forward.
