Tech Talk/By Martha Knight

Education Kindergarten through 12 seems likely to become more technology intensive. Each new wave of curriculum upgrade, increased accountability and heightened proficiency seems to rest on technology.

As someone who was a parent and newsperson when Mr. Ungerer showed off the district’s new Commodore PET computers, three of them,  in the Arnold School aud, I can say the movement toward ever increasing use of computer, network and Internet technology has been rapid, and driven by powerful forces.

Attitudes of public education professions have undergone similar change. The old guard were mightily opposed, for some time. Teachers’ unions viewed “teaching machines” with fear and loathing. Newer, younger teachers were not so technology averse. Some began to crave more computers in the classrooms, more scanners and printers. Then smartboards were everywhere, and instruction was nothing if not interactive, and students could even BYOD, Bring Your Own Device.

I couldn’t help noticing at a recent school board meeting that, right after the session, teachers in attendance, clustered in back, were “on their cells,” and comparing notes with one another concerning the latest iPhone and iOS

New requirements relating to Common Core and other “reforms” are teacher training and “paperwork” intensive. To some extent that paperwork actually may involve hardcopy, but I would hope the term refers mainly to records keeping and to metrics or quantifying., and that most of this will be digital.

Not that I am so impressed with quantifying when that is about testing students more and more. I would have to believe much more firmly than I do in the ability of tests to measure learning, in all important dimensions. If I have some doubts there, I have similar or greater ones concerning tests as a sovereign method for rating (or berating) or evaluating or grading teachers and schools, or, for that matter, funding them .

Technology employed to facilitate communication, understanding and teamwork between/among school and parent and community—now there’s a revolution that can’t happen too soon.

The auguries are good, here. The Academic Improvement Committee has been urging more, better, closer communication, from its first meeting on. Also, it sounds as if the incoming superintendent has a keen personal and professional interest in technology. Go, Mr. Buchsen!

Discussions of implementation of technology often lead to looking at facilities. Facilities designs have not kept up with communications technology changes, so many buildings must be retrofitted, even repeatedly, to accomplish the greater and changing use of technology.

Staff that focus just on technology and connectivity increase. “IT” support is in demand by all departments.. Security requirements get steeper. Privacy must be maintained, but records must be accessible by those with a need-to-know.

And parents! Grandparents! They need to know this and that, in real time whenever possible, and many of them would turn to the web as if by instinct. Google for it! Or go to the URL for that particular kind of information and enter a password and see assignments, test scores, averages, activities, notices.

The public at large wants to know things too. Budgets, taxes, key votes on various matters at school board meetings, who is running for school board, who has retired, who has been hired, who is on leave, what games and concerts and other performances are upcoming, open houses, transportation routes and times. Let it all hang out.

Facebook and other social media can be part of the solution. Teachers, librarians, guidance personnel, nurses, coaches, advisors can post and tweet. Or at least, that is how I hope it will work.

As for that public information, let’s hope it will be readily available online as the new site is set up and “populated.” For instance, the proposed budget could be there. The local school district’s policies, and each update to them. Board meeting agendas and minutes. It would be ideal if those were accessible by all of us.

Having been a tech consultant for quite a while now, and having been an EPA-licensed asbestos hazard control professional for a number of years, some time back, I come from both of those fields as I consider the asbestos abatement problem Cameron County School District is facing. During a school term, the district must get an asbestos-qualified contractor to take out some vinyl-asbestos tile recently “discovered” under the high school gym floor.

With most of our schools still “maintaining in place” some asbestos, usually in relatively inaccessible places, unlikely to be disturbed in normal operations, districts must still have asbestos control consultants, who perform periodic update inspections, and total, from Square One re-inspections every few years. New or updated asbestos management plans must be in each affected building and in the central office. Those can be viewed by the public.

The locations and quantities of any asbestos in place, the history of past abatements, the condition of present asbestos containing building materials (ACBMs or ACMs) are set forth in the asbestos files for each facility. Maintenance personnel are acquainted with that information, or should be, just as here in Port they know that there is asbestos over the auditorium ceiling which must be dealt with if any maintenance or alteration work would cause that area to be breached. Contractors would know that too, when bidding and before working in the building.

If I were doing abatement work now, in addition to my regular drawings of facilities, with the ACM locations marked, and the narratives and descriptions, I’d do .dxf and other illustrations that could be stored electronically and posted on the web.

More and better information and communications—YES! Make it easier, faster, more available. These are not just toys, but tools, and relationship enhancers.