With more than 235 facilities, 166,000 students,
70,000 workstations, and an annual budget of close to
$2 billion, Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools
boasts one of the largest and most sophisticated
educational technology systems in the country. CIO
Maribeth Luftglass shares lessons learned in that
challenging and unforgiving environment.
Q: What has been your experience
with wireless networking at Fairfax?
A: FCPS started focused pilot programs
with wireless LAN carts very early on.
We’ve seen almost exponential growth
of wireless LAN use since then. At this
point, we’re buying more wireless
laptops than desktops. One of our IT
initiatives has been focused around
expanding our infrastructure to accommodate
wireless networks in a controlled
manner. Having wireless access points
on carts works, but you have to keep the
wireless devices close, and that limits
flexibility. With permanent wireless
infrastructure in each building, you can
take your laptop anywhere you need to
go and work in small, flexible groups on
a variety of projects.
Security is an issue, and we have
done a lot of up-front work in securing
our wireless infrastructure. We haven’t
had any major security issues. That
said, there are a few things, like grading,
that we’re not doing wirelessly. We
haven’t experienced any real problems;
we’re just being conservative. We are,
however, doing online testing using
wireless labs.
Q: What are the biggest barriers to
effective K–12 IT service delivery?
A: There are two main areas where
we see significant difficulties. The first
is providing adequate support, by which
I mean the actual support staff. A lot
of available funding, whether from the
state or grants, is focused largely on
hardware, software, and training, but
support, which is key to success, has been
neglected or underemphasized. Fairfax
has invested in support for the technology
in our schools, but it is still a
significant barrier to increased use of
IT resources.
The second barrier has to do with
assuring adequate refreshment of our
technology. Schools don’t want to get
rid of old equipment because it’s still
perceived as useful, and better an old
piece of equipment that works than no
equipment at all. But from the perspectives
of cost, maintenance, and capability,
we’re trying to keep computers to no
more than five years old. The challenge
is to build in actual replacement cycles
and not just add new equipment on top
of the old.
Q:Your perspective on open source
software?
A: We’ve tried to find a middle
ground with open source. Much of our
commonly-used instructional software
for K–12 may only work with Apple or
Microsoft environments. Some others,
though, will work on Linux. Support is
the other key issue. If support isn’t
available for an open source product,
chances are we won’t use it. We’re
approaching it case by case; we do use
Linux-based systems for Internet content
filtering and other uses, and we have
some open source database applications
deployed.
Q: The IT shops in many larger K–12
districts are looking much like enterprise
IT operations, but your mission is different
than a typical Fortune 500 firm. What do
you see as the role of IT in the school?
A: FCPS is a very large district—
with over 30,000 employees, we are the
largest single employer in the state of
Virginia. So we need to provide infrastructure
and support sufficient to run a
major enterprise, including the line-ofbusiness
functions like payroll, financials,
HR, and so on. At the same time,
our bottom-line mission is to provide an
environment for learning. What we’re
always seeking is the balance here
between the enterprise and individual
student needs, weighing hardware and
software standards against flexibility
and intellectual and instructional control
by teachers.
