Site Supervisor Interviews

1. Name of technology coordinator being interviewed.

Andrew Savoy

2. What is your title?

Network Specialist

3. What type of degree is required for your position?

None, at least for me. However, the experience and skill level has to be able to measure
with somebody who does have a degree. For a job like this, if I was in my 20’s and more of an
entry level or even in my early 30’s and only have a few years under my belt then I would
definitely need some type of IT degree. Whether it’s just general IT management or
certifications for networking you do need unless you have tons of experience you do need
certifications on paper that do say you can do this. Basically he’s using years of experience to
compensate for lack of degree.

4. What are your job responsibilities?

That is really hard to quantify, they are very numerous when it comes to this, because
while my title says network specialist I am here because I have such an expertise in general
computers. I have to fix window computers, I have to fix chromebooks, I have to fix the network,
I have to pretty much any technology that’s out there whether it’s the TV’s, the docu cams,
whether it’s projectors I have to be able to know how to work with those and fix them if possible.
Still also do data work and data work meaning windows active directory, the maintenance of the
window systems like the big servers that we have so it an extreme range of responsibilities that I
have.

5. How are you meeting the needs of faculty and staff during the transition to remote
learning this semester?
I’m sure you’ve seen some of the stuff we’ve done, one of the things we did was get an
external monitor for everybody and then after that we got new laptops for everybody that
needed a new laptop and we’re talking hundreds a couple hundred laptops that we’ve gotten in
that I’ve personally been responsible for. I’m the one responsible for finding out what laptops are
going to work the best for us at the best price, and then I’m the one that sets them all up and
delivers them to the sites. So things of that nature are what we are doing, shoring up the
network trying to make the network available for a wider area a little bit to the external parking
lot areas for students if they need it. And just trying to find different ways teachers can utilize
technology like document cameras in their classroom online whereas they weren’t doing that
before that were just doing that in the classroom. Having to figure out what is the best use and
what devices we need for teachers to maximize what they’re use to in the classroom.

6. How are you meeting the remote learning needs of students and parents?
We do, we are very friendly with the students and the parents when it comes to tech
support. We’ll get questions from parents on their networking so we try to help them with some
tips of “hey try this with your network or try that with your network”. When students are having
problems like we sent some of our graphics lab computers home with students that didn’t have
their own windows computers that could handle the graphics programs we sent some of those
home. Then our Adobe licensing changed so students have to get a hold of me and I have to
give them instructions to dial into their computer and get that fixed for them. So we try to
maintain as is they are still on campus we are going to give them the exact same service and fix
things as much as possible as if we are still on campus.

7. What are typical daily activities for your job?

There is none! The first thing I do every morning is check and make sure there is no
network emergencies nothing is on fire try and make sure when people first hit campus
everything is working as best as it can. Then it’s just catch up on emails see what my day is
going to shape up like and plan by what emails are there, what works orders might have come
in or work request then plan my day as to which sites I can hit, which sites are the most
important to go to when it comes to that. Obviously more so when school is in session with
people on campus and then after that once I get an idea of what my day is going to be like of
what I need to fix then it’s research cause there’s always research to be done on our job. What’s
the latest technology what tools are we needing to look at to be forward thinking and it’s just
having a lot of balls in the air and being able to hit the ground running when you need to.

8. Do you have a budget that you control? How do you make decisions on selecting
resources for your stakeholders?
I have certain abilities with our budget to make purchases and decide things within a
limit. If I know that I need a piece of network equipment and it’s not one thousand dollars if it’s a
couple hundred dollars then I can go ahead and purchase that because I know what’s crucial I
know what’s critical and the business department understands that if it’s that critical we don’t
have time to go through the hoops of “can we get this approved?” Obviously, big projects all that
goes through approval so, but what I do is I look at the cost benefit of all the technology; what’s
the depreciation of it, how is it going to be forward looking with technology because I don’t want
to buy something that obsolete in two years or we’re moving away from that method of teaching
in two years which COVID has shown us that there’s different methods of teaching out that and
we have to be able to be forward looking even now to go “I wonder if in a couple of years down
the road how are teachers going to utilize technology in the classroom?” But my job is to find out
where I can save cost on technology stuff, where I can get equipment to keep up to date and
get that equipment at a decent price and if that means redoing a whole network then that means
redoing a whole network. You know which is one of the projects that I’m undertaking because
we’re stuck with our network right now; we have devices from a company that not only are the
devices themselves expensive to buy upfront but there’s a yearly license fee that we have to
pay to them because it’s all cloud based and everything. I’m like I don’t like this model, I don’t
like being beholden and having that cost every single year for stuff that we’ve already bought. I
understand software licensing but when you buy a device that should be it you shouldn’t be
paying yearly to be able to use that device.
9. Have you had an opportunity to impact technology implementation throughout your
school? Would you describe a specific example?
That’s one of the things that I get to do; I get to take a look whether it comes from tech
people at another school district through our network of people or whether it’s just some idea
that I’ve had I do get to look at new technology and I do get to say “hey you know what I really
think we need to move away from this model of doing things and go this way with technology.
One specific example of that is projector systems. I hate the cost of projectors a replacement
bulb is three hundred dollars and even then it’s like you can buy the replacement bulb and the
thing is overheating so you just wasted three hundred dollars on a bulb. While you can try to for
thirty classrooms buy the same projector most of the time that’s not going to work because
some teacher are like “I don’t want to use a projector I like my old projector” so you can’t do
that. But one of the things I’ve done is start trying to move to the model we implemented here at
the middle school which is using LED/LCD TV’s you know the big 50in TV’s coupled with
Chromebits which are little candybar size Chromebook computers. Just plug those in to the
HDMi cord, you got a wireless mouse and keyboard you can do anything that you want that you
would normally do with the Chrome account or Google account on that device at the front of the
room and I found after experimenting and trying with a few different products I found a great
portable webcam that will wireless connect to the Chromebit and TV system. So that teacher if
they wanted to could walk around the room with that document camera and show students
work, they can be in the back of the room showing their work, instead of having to be upfront in
a static position. I think that is something that is needed, teachers being static in the classroom
is a thing of the past. Being able to wonder the classroom, help the students out at their desk is
kind of the way that imagine that school is going to go. That is one specific thing that I’ve
implemented as far as new technology and how we’re doing things. Because I’ve basically said
“no we not buying anymore projectors” for the cost of a projector for a classroom is like easily
five to six hundred dollars we can get a smart TV and a Chromebit and a wireless keyboard for
four hundred dollars for the bundle and that’s going to last five years and not going to need a
replacement part every few years.
Our technology budget for the dictrist is hard for people to understand because that technology
budge is for district wide things as much as possible. We want to be able to provide the laptops
and things like that for teachers but when it comes to individual classroom and things of that
nature we don’t really have the budget or the monies district wide to do that. Teachers will
purchase those with their own accounts of donations teacher funds to be able to do that.
Because really for the district our job is kind of different it’s almost like we are separate and we
have a contract with the school, so if you look at it that way our contract says that we provide
the networking, we provide support, we provide repairs when possible. We’re not responsible for
buying toner, paper stuff. We provide the big stuff as much as possible like the laptops, when
we have the funding for laptops we’ll buy them but most of the time we’re talking in most years
I’m about to buy five to ten laptops because our budget is so slim when it comes to that because
there’s so many other things when it comes to technology that we have to spend our money on.
Which is bringing in the network from AT&T that’s a huge expense, the licensing for all the
software that we use that’s a huge expense. I mean the Adobe licensing, the Microsoft
licensing, the Google licensing all of that is the expense that we have to do then we expect that
the staff or the school sites themselves have their own budget that they can set aside for some
of the smaller things like printers, things that everyone has but you don’t think “where does this
actually come from.”

10. Does your school have a technology committee?

We have the CAT committee. I’ve sat in on a couple of the CAT meetings and that’s
basically we try to get at least for me on the technology side I just try to get ideas form the
teachers of what can be done better, what tools have you seen cause I know teachers have
their own networks of talking to teachers in other districts so what tools have you seen that you
wish we could get or you think that we should look into and I worry more just looking at the
technology side of that CAT committee. Where there’s lots of different things teachers focus on
when it comes to the CAT committee because it’s not just the technology it’s the curriculum and
being lite on your feet with curriculum stuff and being able to change your curriculum if needed
and so I again just worry with the technology stuff. One of the things I find funny with the job is
I’ll be told something “this is critical this has been going on for weeks” and I have a great saying
about that “first I’ve heard of it.” If you’re having an issue come to me as quick as you can with
that issue and don’t wait weeks on it hoping it’s going to resolve itself, tech issues don’t
generally resolve themselves.

11. How are technology decisions made?

When it come to that unfortunately right now my boss my immediate boss in the tech
department she is on leave but when she’s around or when the three of us in our department we
have a round table talk. We sit and discuss once in a while what need to do, what we think
about this, what we think about that especially when COVID first hit it was all three of us
scrambling to go what devices are best suited, what program is it going to be Zoom or is it going
to be Google Meets. What program are we going to use to protect students online, you know
monitoring them online is it going to be Linewize or is it going to be this program or is it going to
be that program. So we just do each of individually will take a little chunk and do research or
look into something and then get back together and go “Ok this is what I’ve found, I really didn’t
like this for this reason I really loved it for this reason.” We try to come up with consensus of this
is what we’re going to do. It’s kind of like what we did with Synergy with the new student
information system. All of us not just the tech department business department did it too
because it integrates with the business department, it integrates with the students services so
we all set through all those presentations and came up with “ok this is the one we think you
know consensus wise is going to be the one that offers everybody at least the majority of what
they need.” So it is a group effort there.
In the case of Illuminate unfortunately Illuminate is going away because the company is
shuttering the program. Some company came in and bought it and said it’s not a money maker
we are discontinuing it. With all the other products we saw part of it is cost of this company has
a core and if you want to do this you have to buy an add on, you want to do that it’s another add
on, you want to do this it’s another add on. So you have to look at things of what does the core
do, how much does the core cost comparison to others and then if we want to utilize Google
single sign on is that extra or is that part of the core package. It’s really just looking at all of it in
totality and also seeing we hear rumors or talk to other people are the same people because it’s
essentially sales people pitching it, and they’ll have a sales person and a technical person but
are they blowing smoke up out butt with what they say they can do and showing us fancy
graphics and fancy pictures but that’s not the reality of how it actually works. One company
wanted us to sign a confidentiality thing and it’s like you know “no we aren’t going to sign a
confidentiality for a product you’re trying to sell us, there’s nothing we’re not signing nothing like
that.
I believe it is, I believe their (Synergy) in at least over two hundred districts throughout
California, you know but they also go up in Oregon and Washington their mostly West coast but
yea their not a small company and that’s another thing. We just moved off Powerschool like
three years four years ago. Powerschool to Illuminate was happening when I started and that
was in 2017; I started here in March of 2017. So that’s when all of that was starting to happen
so the 2017-1018 was the first year we implemented Illuminate from Powerschool. So obviously
this isn’t something that we want to do every three years or four years. We want to make sure
that the software package we went with was going to be there for the long haul. That isn’t going
to be another fiasko like this Illuminate was, because Illuminate is a good product we liked once
we got use to it. It does what we need it to do so it’s unfortunate now that we have to go through
all the work again of implementing a totally different system again.

12. What is the best part of your job?

That’s a tough question to answer because it does kind of change daily but the best part
of my job I pretty much always get instant feedback, instant results as it were. Where what I do
today affects people today, the problems I solve today helps those people that day so that’s an
instant gratification thing with a lot of what I do so that’s fun for me it’s so, it gives you good
feelings and it makes you happy. That’s one thing that if you see me walking around well not
now with the masks but usually when you see me walking around I’ve got a smile on my face.
That’s one of the things that people are, it doesn't matter how bad my day is going, it doesn’t
matter what problems what fire I’m trying to put out you know I’m here. I solve problems one at
a time, I juggle things one at a time, I might have a lot going on in my mind but I know I can only
do one thing at a time for the most part so it’s that instant gratification I love helping people so
being able to be out there and helping teachers who are I have so much respect for for what
they do because it’s affecting one hundred and fifty kids on a daily basis and upwards so if their
technology isn’t working and it puts them in a bad mood that’s going to snowball to those kids.
Where my job is to try and make sure teachers are that’s the least of their worries is struggling
with the technology. So I get to take that concern away from them, I know it affects a lot of
people when I do my job right it makes a lot of people's day better.

13. What do you find to be the most challenging part of your job?
Just dealing with the hierarchy of things and I alluded to it before “that’s the first I’ve
heard of it.” The most challenging part is trying to train people because they’ve been trained not
to complain, they’ve been trained not to bother the tech guy, it’s just muddle through it just
struggle through it, they're busy, they don’t have time for that. I’m trying to get people to realize I
do have time for that. Whether I have time for it that instant is a totally different thing, but if I
don’t know about a problem I can’t solve it, I can’t fix it, I can’t make it better. There’s times with
network things, I’ll fix something and say “let me know how it works” it might work great for a
day or two and start acting up again. If I don’t hear back “hey it’s acting up again” which is what
was happening in C100. I sent an email out to all of them “please let me know if you’re still
having issues” and I never heard back until I heard back from Mike the principal “hey they’re still
having problems in C100.” I’m just like I thought I fixed it because I didn’t hear back. So that to
me is the most difficult part is I can not fix anything if I don’t know that there’s a problem.
Training people that we’re open and we’re free and go ahead and shoot me an email and shoot
us an email, don’t think you're wasting our time or bothering us.