Consider Your District’s Overarching Goals

Technology is an integral part of a school district’s learning environment. How to best support learning goals and objectives of your district should be the paramount driver when building a technology sustainability plan. Review district long- and short-term strategic goals and key performance indicators along with the developed outcomes to generate the drivers for the technology plan. Start with the end in mind. Some questions to consider include:

• Where does your school district want to be one, three, five, and ten years from now?
• What is preventing you from getting there? List your barriers.
• What equity considerations do you need to take into account?
• How can technology best support learning goals?

With the overarching district goals in mind, consider the technology department’s goals:

• Can technology plans be sustained over the next five years?
• What must be reduced or eliminated after COVID funding ends?
• Have you considered all traditional departmental budget planning categories?

Organize your long-range plan and goals in a table similar to this sample template. It is broken into categories that will assist in planning. Seeing each set of responsibilities in a long-range plan will help build a large-scale picture of your vision of how technology will support learning in your district. It also will be helpful as you do lifecycle planning.

Lastly, examine your school district’s and department’s budgeting cycles so that you are able to be proactive in your planning. Here are some questions to consider:

• When do technology requests need to be submitted to your department? Is documentation or data required to justify the purchases? If so, what does the deliverable look like?
• What does the vetting process look like regarding which items stay and which go?
• If additional personnel is included in the budget request do you have the data to back up the need for the additional staff position?
• When does your final technology budget need to be completed so that it can be considered in the district budget cycle?
• How can you creatively support the schools through the use of student tech teams and interns?

Technology planning requires a big-picture strategy. Since technology supports the tools for learning and operations, cross-functional collaboration is necessary. Collaborative planning will help you synchronize and strengthen the resources of all departments as well as help you avoid the duplication of purchases.

Resources:

• Future Ready Schools Framework
• CoSN SEND
• TCO Whitepaper