Regional beginnings

The independent school market had always had regional and national organizations that served as thought leaders and promoters for the schools. NYAIS was the New York group, and there were similar ones in Connecticut, New England, the Midwest, New Jersey, California, the Northwest, Hawaii, the South and elsewhere. There were also national groups like NAIS, NBOA and TABS, focused on leadership, finance and boarding issues. 

Traditionally these organizations had committees for each area of need – admission, finance, leadership and fundraising. These had been active for decades. 

A very broad thinking leader, Peter Tacy, was the director the CT association in the early 1990s. Despite not being a techie —he was a former headmaster — he saw the emerging need for a committee to look at schools, technology and learning. He created the CTAIS Technology Committee and invited emerging tech leaders at a dozen CT schools to meet. This was a first in the country.

We were a motley crew, given that IT was not yet a profession but just a bunch of teachers who somehow had been pushed into the arena by fate. Some were in science and math, others primary school teachers, athletic coaches, English and history teachers. But collectively we were all working at our schools trying to figure out how this should develop. Some schools had already created a budget and named staff, others not.

We had great discussions just informing each other what our challenges were and what we had accomplished and were planning. But there was no overarching plans or concepts.

Somehow Peter got the idea to apply to the EEFord Foundation for a grant to provide statewide technology education. This was again a completely new concept and we needed to decide what, where and who.

People suggested bussing whole cohorts of teachers to a central location, or creating workshops for other tech directors. It was not clear what should be taught and why.

Somehow a novel suggestion emerged. Why not create an educational series of classes for Heads of school and their administrative staff? This was revolutionary. Almost no head of the 50 CT schools had any familiarity with word processing, email, databases or the emerging “internet”. Why not educate them so that they could provide leadership as their schools grappled with staffing and funding and curricular changes? 

We coalesced around this idea and we won the grant from EEFord. Some 10 Heads volunteered to attend the courses. We deliberately had two tracks. One for the Heads and one for their staff, with similar curriculum but separate classrooms and sometimes different days. We decided to call it the CTP—the Curricular Technology Project.

This proved the most successful model. The Heads could be students again and could ask basic questions that might have been embarrassing in front of their staff. The staff could get information about how to order and deploy the technology and then work with their Head to bring it to internal meetings.

This may have been the most important decision made at CTAIS. Within a year there was a cadre of technology innovating schools across the state and they were backed by their Heads. This top down approach meant that the leadership teams at these schools could lead instead of being dragged into something that they did not understand or were not prepared for.