Databus Issue: 2006 2 05/17/2006
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
Darryl LaGace PresidentAchieving Our Goals One by One
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It’s the spring issue already and have we been busy! In the last issue, I mentioned the goals that we set out to accomplish this year and over the last few months your board has been hard at work moving toward these goals. In this issue, you will find progress towards at least two of them.
The first has to do with reaching out to other organizations that can bring value to the membership. One such organization that we have been keeping an eye on is the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). Founded in 1992, CoSN, a national non-profit organization, is the premier voice in education technology leadership at the national level. After much conversation and consideration, CETPA and CoSN have jointly announced the creation of a new California CTO Council which will meet the growing needs of school district technology leaders. The Council of California Chief Technology Officers will be a new division of CETPA and will form the California state chapter of CoSN (see related article on page 9).
It’s important to note that the CTO Council is not related to CETPA’s CTO Mentor Project which will establish a curriculum of study and certification for the K-12 population of technologists who can become qualified and strong technology leaders.
The other goal we have focused on is how to provide more leadership and resources to support current and future initiatives such as the CTO mentor program. This has led us to the posting of CETPA’s first Executive Director position. Additional details and requirements relating to the position are available by visiting the CETPA website at: www.cetpa-k12.org (also see page xx).
Along with the focus on goals, we continue to produce a theme based quarterly publication. This issue of DataBus focuses on network infrastructure. As more classrooms become dependent on technology to support and deliver instruction, our network infrastructures can really be put to the test. In Lemon Grove School District, we have been supporting a 1:2 ratio of computers to students K-8 for a number of years. We recently launched a 1:1 academy at our middle schools. We are currently three years into this program. However, the first year was less than perfect and many of the problems stemmed from (wireless) network issues. I can only tell you I was happy that we started small so we could get a handle on things. Years two and three saw a 200 percent expansion of the program for (students and teachers) and, as anyone who is reading this probably knows, you don’t get many second chances when it comes to having teachers depend on technology for instruction.
As with many of our themes I hope you will appreciate and enjoy the theme as much as I do. We rely on the strength of our membership for much of the content in the DataBus. If you have a great story to tell or feel you can shed some light in a particular area of interest to the membership, feel free to contact our Editor Rob Chambers at (Databus@cetpa-k12.org). Our next theme is focused on Open Source in Education.
