Going Regional and National

With the success of the CAIS CTP model, our technology group in CT was being invited to talk with other like groups. The independent school market has a dozen or more groups, and they then planned a meeting of all the association leaders—in Hawaii!

It was the summer of 1996 and Peter Tacy, the ED of the CT Association, put in a proposal for me to give a talk about school technology leadership. I had given a similar one at the NAIS national meeting the previous year.

We were hosted primarily by HAIS, the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools and met at the Punahou School. Despite the isolation Hawaii boasts some of the most prestigious private schools in the country, including Kamehameha, one of the wealthiest schools in the world catering to the education of native Hawaiians. Barack Obama had been a student at Punahou.

It was an honor to meet the EDs from all the associations, including Pat Bassett from ISACS. He would soon serve as the ED of NAIS for many years and lead that organizations efforts to bring technology into education nationally. There were representatives from 19 different regional associations included SAIS, AISNE, PNAIS, PAIS, CAIS(California), NYAIS, and ones from Florida, Tennessee, Maryland and more. Quite a representation of the schools of the US.

It is hard to grasp today but at that time Windows had only been out for about a year. Only a few schools had websites. Many were not yet wired. Email and databases were still fairly new and only at a few schools were a majority of the faculty regularly using computers either for reporting or in their teaching. There was a lot to discuss.

As a demonstration, I brought a sample install of FirstClass to the conference. The Punahou IT folks let me install in onto the dozen or so computers in their library computer center where we were meeting. 

For one of the sessions, a group of the EDs sat around the lab and I gave them all FC accounts. Then we proceeded to chat by text live among that group AND with some my staff back at Loomis Chaffee. Overall, they were stunned. They asked questions live to some of my academic and administrative colleagues back at Loomis. I had to call time eventually because the conversation was going so long even though we were just typing.

Soon after the conference I learned that many new schools signed up with FirstClass based on recommendations from those attendees. 

My main talk is equally hard to comprehend today – “What is the difference between Email, the World Wide Web, and the Internet. Up to that point, probably only 40-50% of faculty and staff at most schools had email, few schools had websites, and “getting the internet” was just a buzz word. Parents and their companies were just getting started also. For many, email was still a bit of a nuisance. People preferred a phone call or perhaps a letter. 

The question and answer period was lively. People asked if FirstClass, which had email and chat, was “the internet”? Why did a school need a website? Again, very few parents or students knew about the web yet or used it. Why spend money on a “website” when no one would use it? How much did “the internet” cost?

It really is hard now to recall those days and conversations but that was the reality. If your customers – parents and students – did not have computers or use the internet or have email, why get out in from of them? The web had only started in 1993 and the capabilities were very limited. Almost no one was creating apps that ran on the web.

Between 1996 and 2000 pretty much every school was undergoing rapid technical and cultural change. By 2000 almost every school had email, a website, administrative databases, an internet connection, computer labs, and a technology staff of at least one. That is a lot of change in 5 years.