FCPS IT chief steps down
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| Luftglass |
Maribeth Luftglass has stepped down from her job as head of IT at Fairfax County Public Schools, following the school system’s disastrous experience with distance learning, several news outlets report.
Luftglass had been assistant superintendent of information and technology since 1999. Chief Operating Officer Marty Smith will take over the IT department on an interim basis.
Distance learning was initially supposed to start April 14, but school was canceled for the rest of the week as a result of numerous technical problems.
The Blackboard 24-7 system hadn’t been updated, leading to a lack of capacity, as a result, many students couldn’t log in. And because of insufficient security, some students used the system for inappropriate language and behavior.
Related story: FCPS to drop Blackboard Learn 24-7
Superintendent Scott Brabrand promised the system would work when distance learning resumed April 21, but the glitches continued.
Brabrand announced that evening that FCPS would drop Blackboard 24-7 as a tool for face-to-face instruction. FCPS hired a law firm to determine how distance learning went wrong, and Brabrand established a technology advisory council to come up with recommendations for distance learning going forward.
Related story: FCPS apologizes for distance learning failure
FCPS hired a law firm… really, no consulting firms in the area were available? I don't know this firm, but a law fime?
And firing the IT Chief that has been there since 1999 sounds like scapegoating.
Maybe it was her fault, maybe it wasn't, but we really need to get over this thing where someone always has to lose their job. I am guessing she was asked to step down, and made the scapegoat. This is a huge school system with a ton of administrators – this was not one person's doing. Sounds to me like there was a lot that went wrong, probably at different levels and in different divisions/departments etc., but to pin it on this one woman seems incredibly unfair. She obviously has experience in this field, maybe instead of having someone step down, try learning from the mistakes that were made and moving forward?
Learning from mistakes is fair however we are talking about a child's future and this is a shameful situation that demands accountability. Perhaps this is unfair but children unable to learn because educators were not prepared is ten times worse. It will be very interesting to see how many more "administrators" are terminated-retired or relocated. Also, parents should be FURIOUS!!
How does dropping Blackboard serve the students? Is FCPS the only school system in the country using this platform? Are there other school systems experiencing the same issues with Blackboard as FCPS? If so, there has been no news of it. That would leave one to believe that the problem actually lies with FCPS. The extraordinary level of incompetence at FCPS is staggering. Although, it should not surprise anyone. This is the same school system that spent millions of dollars on changing the name of JEB Stuart High School when the money could have been put to use actually educating the students on the importance (not to say positive importance) of JEB Stuart in history. Stop sending out repetitive emails about how sorry you are FCPS and put together an actual plan of action that includes getting the teachers faces in front of the students and teaching them something other than how to process their 'feelings'. Leave that to the professionals.
FCPS needs to get their act together and forget about firing, retiring or otherwise placing blame and suing people. FCPS has more that it's share of shortcomings that should be addressed after the mission of education is addressed. That is why we're all here, isn't it? To educate children? And on another note, why were teachers not more proactive in setting up lessons and alternative learning for students during the first month of school shutdowns. They are still getting paid, after all.
One more thought: the local news was just talking about how the distance learning experience for Loudoun, Arlington and Alexandria has been mostly positive. Question: what held FCPS back from turning to their peers in other school districts that were having success to ask for guidance/help/input? This is not a time to be an island.
My kids teachers WERE proactive in reaching out to the students. They created little youtube lessons and hosted unofficial get togethers for the class. If there is anyone that is NOT to blame here it is the teachers, who have had to completely adapt on the fly to this stuff and rewrite lesson plans. It’s not their fault they are being let down by FCPS IT.
Renaming to Justice HS didn't cost "millions" of dollars. Numbers I've seen are in the $450K range, which was offset by over $90K in donations.
This has been a huge Fail Whale for FCPS. The IT superintendant needed to go to pave the way for fresh energy and talent to come in and get FCPS out of this mess.
To truly understand what led to this failure, you really need to understand some of the technical aspects of it. FCPS was self-hosting their blackboard installation. There is no way in hell a self-hosted install (vs public IAAS cloud like AWS or Azure) was going to meet the capacity demands of over a hundred thousand students logging in at once. They should have spent the 3 weeks between when they shut the schools down and when they first tried this stuff to extend their capacity to a cloud provider. But beyond capacity questions, the whole fact that they hadn’t upgraded in years is just wholly inexcusable and that lies on that IT person’s shoulders. There was even a CVE that I believe was left unpatched because of the lack of upgrades… I’m waiting to hear back from the school system on that. Also inexcusable was that they had set up blackboard in such a way that it was even possible for teachers to use an unsecure method to communicate with students. Sloan Prisidio tried to pawn it as a “training” issue because they didn’t train the teachers right on how to set the links up securely, but that’s BS. System administrators that know what they are doing don’t allow users to do things that will compromise the system.
There’s a lot more that could be said, as someone who is a technical person, I have seen so many technical red flags that their IT lead absolutely had to go.
As far as Braband’s new superintendent advisory committee – I’m less than impressed with that. All 3 people he put on that committee have conflicts of interest and are all extremely senior people – i.e. they haven’t been in the day to day operations enough to know what to be looking for. It very much looks like he created that group more for looks and show rather than to get anything real accomplished.
Interesting info Jeff, thanks
This was LONG overdue. So many people at the top of IT in FCPS without hard IT skills. Lots of budget types, at the coordinator/director levels and above who belong in finance, not IT. Unfortunately, it became painfully obvious just how dire a situation that was when distance learning was needed most. There was NO PLAN and the finger pointing and amount of blame casting was most disturbing.