The responsibilities of leadership don’t disappear overnight. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you’ve been carrying until you set them down. This week, for the first time in twenty years (actually for the first time ever!), I’m not going back to school. That sentence still feels strange to write. For my first ten years in…
Everyone keeps asking the same question: “What AI tool should we use?” I think that’s the wrong question. The better question is: Do our people trust us enough to learn alongside us? Because the tool does not fail first. The trust does. I learned that lesson during COVID. The Lesson We Learned During COVID Like…
I have been quiet here for almost a month. Three conferences in five weeks will do that to you. So will watching something you helped build finally stand on its own. That’s what happened at the Indiana CTO Clinic earlier this month, and I’ve been sitting with it long enough now to write about it….
In K–12 leadership, we work with a lot of vendors. Some are responsive. Some are innovative. Some are persistent. But very few are true partners. And in this moment, the difference matters more than ever. District leaders are navigating AI, cybersecurity, interoperability, enrollment shifts, staffing shortages, board politics, and community trust, often all at once….
Data Privacy Week + a Birthday Reflection There’s a kind of leadership work that never gets applause. No ribbon cuttings. No launch-day selfies. No “look what we built” moment. And yet, everything depends on it. This week is Data Privacy Week, and it also happens to be my birthday. That overlap feels fitting. Birthdays make…
What happens when students become the architects of change in their own learning? For four years, I watched high school students coach veteran teachers, redesign classroom assignments, and present at state conferences. This wasn’t a feel-good side project or an enrichment club tucked neatly after school. It was a working model of how educational technology…
It’s easy to think of attendance as a number. Percentages. Tardies. Absence codes. Thresholds. But when you sit where district leaders sit, you quickly learn: chronic absenteeism isn’t just an attendance problem. It’s a reflection of belonging, access, and often, unseen barriers that stand between a student and the classroom. Every absence has a story,…
