Change At The End Of The Year

Many educational bloggers are taking the time at the end of the year to blog about the highlights of the year. For me, this has been a year of subtle, yet great change. Not so much in the day to things I do in my job but in the overall tenor and intellectual scope of my job. Much of that change will hit in September.

I serve 3 schools, PK-4, about 240 kids in each school. In those buildings I have 9 colleagues who will be retiring in a week and a day. I look at the folks moving on and all of them were here before I came. I looked to them because it was their schools, their school district. I needed to learn the norms and ways of how they were doing it. Making may mark, of course, moving the technology ball forward, but there was a sense that what they were doing was pretty good, and we needed to fit technology into that bigger picture.

I wonder now if it is "my" school system. The superintendent who hired me is retiring, the assitant supt, who has been my direct supervisor for the last decade is moving up. I am glad for him, he is a good man, an excellent educator and has an excellent prespective on the role of technology in education. The Town/School/Regional District IT department was reorganized last summer and a dear colleague became the IT director of all teh "entities" as we have come to call them. The movement of the Asst. Supt. to Supt, kind of puts the leadership of where we go w/ technolgy back onto this re-organized department. It is yet to be worked out but already I can feel it. We will be called on and turned to chart the direction for a variety of technologies. Fells like all of a sudden we are the grown ups. That is OK. I get paid well for what I do, and feel I can grow in that direction. However in the past it was executing a plan that was articulated in many other place, defined by other folks. I had a voice, but a small one. Now I look around and we are the planners, the one ultimately charting the course.

It is not good, it is not bad, it is just beginning to look and feel different. My plan is to retire from doing this job in six school years. In terms of what will be a 33 career, I look at it as kind of the last lap, the last chance to play with ideas and concepts on this stage. I wonder if it is best viewed as a long relay race and I have just been passed the baton for my section of the relay.