Driving Better Connectivity for Students

Neal Weaver, Chief Information and Strategy Officer, Santa Fe Public Schools

Can you tell me about your role, journey, and responsibility in your current organization?

I currently work as the Chief Information and Strategy Officer at Santa Fe Public Schools, and my responsibility is to check the functionality of the technology that keeps student data secure and the network safe.

Since the pandemic, one of the main goals we have been working on the most is ensuring students have a connection from home, primarily accomplished through T-Mobile and Verizon hot spots. We discovered that more than half of them lacked adequate access to meet their educational needs, which included video conferencing and digital resources.

We collaborated with many vendors to investigate the issue. We took part in a groundbreaking study with CoSN, the Consortium for School Networking, and Innive. These companies assisted us in collecting 2.5 million data points on student throughput over six weeks. This focused on the actual internet experience rather than network speed, which helped us realize that students were not receiving enough connectivity from home.

There is no single solution, and a multi-pronged approach is necessary to try to minimize the homework and connectivity gap. One of the things we did was the switch from a consumer hotspot to a more commercial hotspot provided by Kajeet, a company that offers educational connectivity solutions. These hotspots operate on more channels than consumer hotspots, promoting better connectivity for students. We are also collaborating with native businesses to develop free in-home broadband for students. 

One such business is Lokket, a company willing to provide free basic broadband to any Santa Fe resident. That was a year after the pandemic, and we were working remotely at the time. We were still connected to Innive when we returned and were able to examine student connectivity and discover some interesting facts.

Connectivity from Santa Fe Public Schools has especially improved. We still have a long road ahead in terms of connectivity from home, although it is far superior now than before the pandemic.

One of the things we discovered is that, while throughput is faster from schools than from homes, the amount of data that students use for educational purposes at home is growing exponentially since we returned to in-person learning. Among the most important factors that we're addressing in schools today, in my opinion, is having a keen understanding of the ways that students connect to the internet and ensuring that this connectivity means providing sufficient throughput.

In today's post-COVID world, apart from connectivity, what other issues are noticeably plaguing the market today?

Undoubtedly one of the most serious issues exacerbated by the pandemic is staffing, particularly in the technology sector. We are confronted with difficulties in hiring qualified people in the educational system. Having to look for creative ways to staff and sometimes hiring contractors to fill in the gaps is a concern that we regularly face in technology, particularly in education.

Santa Fe Public Schools is striving to become a school for career-based learning and integrating students into the workforce while they are still in school. We are attempting to establish relationships with local community colleges and local employers, particularly in the technology sector, to bring skilled staff or staff who can learn technology skills while still in school.

We are trying to encourage local businesses to collaborate with schools to provide young students with fundamental technology and computer science skills. By providing these students with work, pay, and the opportunity to earn a high school diploma at the same time, businesses are essentially investing in their future employees.

In your opinion, where is the education technology market moving to five years down the line? 

When you look at education from 30,000 feet above, the view of our system did not change very much until recently. The pandemic prompted the education system to adopt remote learning, for which we were unprepared.

One of the benefits of Santa Fe public schools is that we use an education technology note, which taxpayers fund, to ensure that we are prepared for a scenario like this. We had not anticipated this, but we had already ensured that all of our students had devices and we had a learning management system in place. We never really considered remote learning, but we prepared our teachers for hybrid learning through regular professional development programs. This put Santa Fe Public Schools at an advantage and well ahead of the curve compared to many other school districts.

In the future, the role of a chief technology officer will evolve and become more closely aligned with day-to-day teaching and learning. People with insufficient pedagogical experience who enter the education field from the corporate world will be particularly disadvantaged. Recognizing the work within schools is critical to being a great CTO because they are required to understand the complexities of the systems they support.

What advice would you give your peers and aspiring entrepreneurs starting in the same role?

The most important piece of advice I could give anyone is to figure out how to build relationships within your school district, such as cabinet-level and director-level staff members that support the district's goals. We must ensure that we are working toward the same goals as the rest of the district. Student learning is one of those primary goals that help us ensure that we all work together toward the same goals and in a positive environment.

Learning Management