As CIO of the Los Angeles Unified School District,
Captain Margaret Klee, USN (Ret.), oversees 600
employees, a $58 million budget, and a mind-boggling
900,000 users—more than the entire population of
Delaware. With 23 years of IT experience in the military,
most recently heading up the Navy Telecommunications
Command in San Diego, she’s breathing new life into the
district’s technology strategy.
Q: LAUSD implemented a decision
support system over two years ago. Can
you describe its significance to date?
A: Previously we had a lot of data in
our computer systems but couldn’t get at
it. When someone wanted a report, it
sometimes took a programmer several
weeks to produce it. By having a system
that automatically extracts the data into a
warehouse, it gives users opportunities to
access and manipulate the data as they see
fit. We started with student performance
data but now we’re adding financial and
teacher credentialing data. So in the future
the district will be able to analyze whether
spending in various areas improved student
performance, for instance.
Q: What are some ways you’ve been
able to improve operational efficiencies?
A: Well, for the past three years I’ve
cut the district’s phone bill in half—about
$12 million in savings per year. I hired
somebody who had retired from the telephone
industry and basically let her start
running telephones like a business. There
were problems as simple as not turning
off the phone lines of people who had
moved locations and getting rid of
duplicative equipment. Also, we quit
renting equipment and used the E-rate
program to buy our own. It’s fairly common-
sense stuff but if you don’t have
someone managing an area with the right
expertise, they just don’t know to do it.
I also set up a security department,
which is absolutely critical. When I
came here we didn’t even have antivirus
software—a real scary thought. One of
our ongoing challenges as more and
more of our software systems go online
is people wanting to use them at home.
However, you have to protect student
and personnel data, so before we put
information online—much less open it
up to people at home—we need the
right security in place. Data privacy is a
huge liability if you don’t take reasonable
precautions to protect the data.
Q: Define “reasonable precautions.”
A: The ideal is to lock it in a brick
building with no wires going in or out,
and no windows, but that’s not reality.
So is encryption enough? Is requiring
passwords enough? Some things
require greater degrees of security. For
instance, we totally encrypt insurance
data on our employees before it is
transmitted. On the other hand, if
teachers are entering students’ grades
from home, that’s less critical than
accessing entire student records. We’ve
assigned data owners at the district
because once we set up a security system
they have to sign off whether they
think there’s enough protection. But
ultimately it comes down to “what’s
the risk and how much risk are we
willing to take?”
Q: Who, exactly, are the data owners?
A: Any student data is owned by the
instruction side, any financial data is
owned by the CFO, and so on. In the
past there’s been a tendency to think IT
owns all the data. Absolutely not. It’s
owned by the primary user of that
data—all we do is process it and make
recommendations on how to protect it.
Q: How does IT management in
K–12 compare to the Navy?
A: One area that’s no different in
education than in the military is the
challenge of getting your users to define
their requirements. Too often users want
to define what they want for a solution
rather than telling you what it is they
need to do. Those are often two very
different answers.
Read the expanded version of this interview
at www.techlearning.com/schoolcio.
