Features August 2018

Once a week beginning around 6 a.m., scales, chord progressions and simple ditties emanate from one of the music rooms at White Oak High School in Jacksonville, North Carolina. As Onslow County School District has a robust music program, this is to be expected. What isn’t expected, though, is that local students aren’t creating that […]

In and of themselves, report cards can be complicated to decipher—antics of the likes of Bart Simpson aside—but imagine the added challenge as parents try to make sense of them in a foreign or a second language. Now imagine those parents receiving their child’s report card accompanied by a link to a personalized video; in […]

There’s a lot of talk about the importance of medical care and closing the coverage gap—but what if your main concern is having a roof over your head or enough food to feed your family? Among myriad challenges to the country’s healthcare, is ensuring that providers and insurers have access to secure, protected and up-to-date […]

There are times when hope for a better tomorrow seems to abound as Marlo Gaddis observes what even the youngest students can create with technology in the public schools of Wake County in the middle of North Carolina. For example, during this past academic year Gaddis, the district’s interim chief technology officer since November, watched […]

When the 12,000 students who attend the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) returned to school this August, the buildings and classrooms were largely unchanged, save for a few, mostly minor renovations. The window-laden Student Services Center still shimmered in the sun, while across the street people sauntered and splayed around the leafy park—just […]

A man who acknowledges he bores easily wouldn’t seem likely to stay with the same employer for 17 years, but Steven R. Ferguson has never lacked for motivation in the many info-tech roles he has held at the Technical College System of Georgia. “It’s an ever-changing field,” the energetic and engaging Ferguson tells Toggle while […]

They call him “Positive Pete,” a name befitting a lovable cartoon character or a super hero—and in some ways you could say he is. Peter Santos has earned the nickname with his welcoming and upbeat leadership style, as well as his flexibility and dedication to finding solutions to the toughest problems. “I take a positive […]

Brian Anderson has spent a whole lot of time in kitchens, and one recent afternoon was no different. Except, on this particular day, the one he was sitting in was a rough-hewn mock-up made of plywood, blue painter’s tape and hand-written signs designating where items such as “future braise #1” and “soup #3” would go. […]

What a difference a few years makes, John Daane had to be thinking on the last Thursday in June, when the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority’s five-member board very routinely OK’d his request to replace its Enterprise Resource Planning software. “I expected some questions and further discussion,” mused the Dutch-born, info-tech director of the local government […]

The rewards—the tangible ones—might be greater in the private sector,  where Bobby Applegate applied his info-tech expertise before circumstances had him, and so many of his colleagues, looking elsewhere for much of 2011. For their long-time employer, Word & Brown Insurance Administrators Inc. in Orange, California, was undergoing a shakeup and had cut the IT […]