By Zach Peace, Justin Burkhardt, Kyle Strubeck
The TL-2020 program is perhaps the most impactful initiative in the history of our district, but no-one knows its name. This effort to integrate technology into our classroom has paid great dividends to our quality of education over the years.
Originally known as TL-2014, the goals of this program are what gave us the Salisbury we know today. Our one-to-one technology, our MacBooks and the FalconApps system all emerged out of this effort. We sat down with two of the individuals responsible for the program, our superintendent, Dr. Randy Ziegenfuss and our associate superintendent, Lynn Fuini-Hetten. He told us more about the history of the program and how exactly it began.
The first benefits from the program came when the Class of 2019 was in elementary school. Students were provided with carts of laptops for use in school. This was quickly expanded to a one-to-one platform for all students above the elementary school level. Today, all students have one-to-one privileges, but they need to wait until middle school to take them home.
After speaking to administration, we interviewed our Principal, Mrs. Morningstar, for an additional perspective on the program. She offered critical insight about the experience of the administration within the school helping implement the new tech program into our classrooms. She also gave us the information for Salisbury’s main contact with Apple.
Tim McHugh, an Apple Account Executive, was Salisbury’s primary link with our technology distributor. Through him, we received our laptops, our Ipads, access to teacher training programs and technology assistance.
He described the effort to integrate technology with Salisbury as rather unique. “There has always been a clear vision for the district” within Salisbury with Dr. Ziegenfuss at the helm, according to Mr. McHugh. The integration has been so successful that many representatives of other districts have come to McHugh with the intention of imitating Salisbury’s program. Mr. McHugh also praised our director of technology, Chris Smith, for his valuable input and understanding of the technology.
As an Apple Account Executive who is directly in contact with districts across Pennsylvania, a large part of Mr. McHugh’s job is to convince districts to take Apple’s offer and increase their technology integration in the classroom. He advocates for increases in technology based on the following philosophy:
“In today’s workforce, technology is everywhere! Not just the jobs that we historically thought of as “high tech,” but look around us – in our stores, police and fire vehicles, airline operations, banking, manufacturing, healthcare, just to name a few. One of our largest corporate customers, as well as a development partner, is IBM. Today’s workforce is all about collaboration with technology.”
With Tim McHugh and Apple’s help, Tl-2014 has proved to be an effective solution to successfully integrating technology into our school infrastructure that has led to increased collaboration amongst peers, exciting new programs for teachers to experiment with, and a one-to-one initiative that better prepares us for the world and for the workforce. As a district, we are lucky to receive an education that is inclusive of technology. This is thanks to the hard work and constant efforts of our administration and our faculty in ensuring our capabilities with technology.
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