My background is not in technology. I wasn't an IT director. I came from a classroom and a principalship, and my heart is really around the "ed" in education technology. But because I was born in 1981, I grew up in a unique time in terms of technology.

I think growing up, going from no internet to internet, I'm in this unique space to think about technology in a different way. I look at older colleagues and I still see real fear around technology. And then in younger generations, I often see the inability to think critically about it. But I think that the adaptability and problem-solving skills that elder millennials have around it— the comfort that we just naturally have with workarounds—that's a very intuitive thing.

The role of TSS [Technological Support Services] in our district is to provide tools, but let instructional experts lead the way. Our job isn't to create instructional initiatives for the district, but to support them. So, for my position, our superintendent intentionally placed an educator in the technology department. As a CTO, my job was to take what the technology people said and make that understandable for the third grade teacher, and vice versa.

For example, if TSS wanted to set more robust passwords with 16 characters and capitalized letters, I would say, "Have you ever been in a kindergarten class and seen what that looks like? It will take the teacher 45 minutes to get those kids to type in 16 characters. We can't go down that road. What are our other options?"

I don't want to suggest that the pandemic was a good thing, but in terms of education technology, it got us to a point that was unimaginable before. Every classroom in our district had the same devices. We were all working on the same software. We were all talking the same language. I didn't want to lose that momentum, so I knew we had to provide continued training. That's why Las Cruces started Impact.

When Impact began in 2023, we probably had about 100 participants from our district. In 2024, we had more participants from throughout the region. There were sessions made for the very beginner—the person who needs help turning their laptop on and learning how to use their email. I put a lot of time, energy, resources and thought into those people because, often, they're scared. We did everything we could to help them move beyond their fear. We've also been really careful to make sure our conference isn't a group of corporate sponsors that are trying to sell their products. Our sessions were led by our own teachers, modeling the work that they were doing.

This year, we combined Impact with our bilingual education conference, Sábado Gigante. Part of our commitment to providing the best instructional resources for our students is around language consideration and translation. We're very much a bilingual community, so we need to be able to communicate in multiple languages. Technology allows us to provide quality education in multiple languages, and that access is fundamental to our teaching and learning philosophy.

So the new, combined event is really all about bridging gaps and finding opportunities to bring things together. It's created great conversations around not only biliteracy and bilingualism, but also technology as a literacy. And it's still free—so other school districts are starting to plan their calendars around it. With bigger conferences like ISTE [International Society for Technology in Education] and FETC [Future of Education Technology Conference], there are sometimes real cost barriers for people. It's just not possible for some of our smaller school districts in New Mexico to attend. But Las Cruces is attainable for them in a way that getting to ISTE this summer in San Antonio may not be.

Coming out of the pandemic, the job need in technology increased, and the overall need around technology expertise shifted. So one of my goals was to encourage students to consider the field of technology.

In our work-based learning program, our high school students are able to earn credit for work that's supervised by licensed teachers. For example, if a student wants to become a veterinarian, they can sign up for related class work under a teacher and then be placed at a job site for certain hours of their day and get credit for that.

For those students interested in technology, our district is actually their job site. They may be placed in an elementary school where they can serve and assist our school technician with managing school devices. If they're interested in networking at some level, they may work in our central office with our network administrators. And since we can rely on school transportation, this program is uniquely accessible to all students. Plus, with 40 school sites, we can place student technicians close to their homes. The single veterinary office, on the other hand, might be 20 miles away and less accessible for some students.

At first, the student technician program only ran during the school year. But post-COVID, we were a one-to-one district and our district calendar had just shifted—so, in addition to having all these new devices to manage, our summer break became shorter. We realized we really needed student technicians during the summer, too, to help us do a lot of the prep work for the next academic year.

We're lucky that our county agreed to assist with funding a paid summer internship for student technicians. When it started, my goal was to eventually have one summer intern at all 40 of our school sites. Over time, we were able to grow it from 8 students the first year to 40 last summer.

Again, that was a response to the pandemic and the shift in the amount of technology knowledge that we needed. We took a look at our credentialed employees, our technicians—many of whom are not four-year degree folks—and we asked ourselves, "What are their options for advancement within our system? And how do we continue to build our own?"

So we built a program that gave our non-degreed technicians—and even some with degrees—the time, tuition, resources and mentorship to grow their skills. The idea was to move them into the role of a junior systems administrator—the employees that are in more of a centralized role in the office, doing work around cyber security, software deployment, updates and phishing, etc.

TSS as a department shifted our budget to pay for those accreditations. We are partnering with vendors for the products, and we purchase the course materials. So TSS is providing the platform and the resources for them. We've also shifted some of our job descriptions so applicants without a degree—but who have lots of work experience—now qualify.

What we're seeing is a growing pipeline that, I hope, lasts way longer than I do. Students that were in our work-based learning program or summer internship program are beginning to graduate and enter our system—as work-study students in college or even as full-time employees. And then we're seeing some of those employees that were technicians advance their skills and move up into junior systems administrator roles. That GYO model is something that we set up in our community for the long term because we care about keeping folks in our community and creating opportunities for upward mobility.

AI has really shifted everything for us very quickly. At a leadership level in our district, we really see it as a tool that is not going away.

Nationally, there have been emerging models around AI acceptable use policies that use red, yellow and green coding. For instance, there are red, foundational knowledge pieces where we do not allow AI use. A lot of assignments live in yellow, where AI use may or may not be permissible depending on the teacher's comfort with it. And then there are some assignments that are green where it's fully permissible. There are guidelines around that, like students always have to cite AI when they use it.

Our director of instructional technology works with a committee that includes educators, technology people and leadership within the district to provide a framework for teachers that lays out what a red assignment entails. For a colleague who works in secondary social studies, an example might be a lesson on the Declaration of Independence. That first step might be, "Let's read it together and have a classroom conversation about key ideas." That's a fully red assignment. We don't want students to use AI on that. We don't even necessarily want them to use technology. We want them to use what we call our "HI" or human intelligence on that.

Down the road, the teacher might say, "Let's create our own classroom Declaration of Independence." That's an assignment that the teacher might determine is yellow or green, based on their comfort level and the context of the lesson. Soon we'll send posters to every classroom about it so the students understand the system, too.

The most common piece of AI that we see students using is Snapchat's AI feature. It shows up just like a friend; it's almost the same kind of conversation. So there's a growing awareness for us around students who form emotional connections with AI and what is lost when a student develops that type of relationship—because we place real value on community and connection and culture. That's just another complicated layer of the AI conversation.

I think we're seeing nationally, and even internationally, a thoughtful pendulum shift around stepping away from technology a little bit. I really support that in many ways.

I see technology and media literacy more generally as a tool for democracy. I used to tell students: It's really easy for us to be downloaders of information. But in order to contribute to the collective knowledge of this country and the world, we have a responsibility to be ethical, truthful, responsible, careful uploaders of information, too.