St. Vrain Valley School District champions innovation in education

CTO Michelle Bourgeois champions student success with leadership in technology and learning

Just north of Denver, Colorado, lies the St. Vrain Valley School District, home to more than 33,000 students across 60 schools and programs. Heading up the technology team at St. Vrain is Chief Technology Officer Michelle Bourgeois. When she began her career some 30 years ago as a fifth-grade teacher in Louisiana, Bourgeois could not have imagined that she would become an award-winning IT executive overseeing innovative learning technology initiatives at St. Vrain.

With university degrees in education rather than IT, Bourgeois was nevertheless always eager to learn how technology could support students and learning. “CTO probably wasn’t what I would have said I was going to be when I grow up. But even in my early teaching days, I remember believing that technology could connect my students to the world. I had a modem in my classroom and a long telephone cable that I would run down the hallway. I would use the faculty room telephone for a dial-up connection to the internet and just pray that no one needed to use the phone for a conference call,” recalled Bourgeois.

As technology plays a growing role in supporting student learning, Bourgeois used her teaching experience to guide her approach as she transitioned to IT. She explained that her focus remains on student achievement and success: “I have realized that at the heart of any leader is a teacher. Leveraging the skills that I learned over years in the classroom, I try to help bring the mindset that we’re always learning, growing, and improving, and we’re always thinking about how we serve our customers – students, teachers, and staff – to help them grow.”

“I have realized that at the heart of any leader is a teacher. Leveraging the skills that I learned over years in the classroom, I try to help bring the mindset that we’re always learning, growing, and improving, and we’re always thinking about how we serve our customers – students, teachers, and staff – to help them grow.”

– Michelle Bourgeois, CTO, St. Vrain Valley School District

Building guardrails for technology innovation

From robotics to virtual reality, Bourgeois shares in the excitement of new technologies for learning. In the past, St. Vrain lacked centralized visibility into technology adoption by schools in the district, resulting in technology purchases that sometimes introduced risk, duplication, or incompatibility. Her department, District Technology Services (DTS), wanted to better support exploration of new learning technologies but also ensure that solutions met requirements for security, safety, privacy, and compatibility.

To address this challenge, an award-winning program called DTS Innovative Tech Framework was developed to provide valuable guidance for St. Vrain schools on how new technologies fit into the district’s overall vision, how they might be adopted across schools, and what parameters to consider prior to purchase. Bourgeois explained, “We decided to figure out how we could work together to support technology such as augmented reality and robotics, rather than restrict it. By partnering with our schools in these endeavors, the framework shifted the whole conversation around innovation and technology. It’s helped us break the cycle of schools buying digital resources and then finding out later that it doesn’t connect to the network or there’s a data breach somewhere.”

Proven advice from Info-Tech’s experts

Bourgeois and her team are also focused on bringing maturity to their own strategies, processes, and applications. To help update and formalize its approach, the DTS department turned to Info-Tech Research Group for best-practice research and consulting expertise. For example, to guide strategic direction for IT-related projects, the team leveraged an Info-Tech Guided Implementation, Establish an Effective IT Steering Committee, where an Info-Tech analyst spent time over the phone during key project milestones to advise, coach, and offer insight. “We worked with Info-Tech on that project and now we have a business technology advisory committee, which standardizes processes for how we gain stakeholder buy-in during IT decision making. That’s been really successful and something that had never been done at our district. It was a big help for us to get some outside perspective from Info-Tech,” said Bourgeois.

In addition, the team recently participated in an Info-Tech workshop on enterprise content management (ECM) strategy, as they plan to centralize ECM across the district. “We are in the beginning stages of building a more mature model for content management in St. Vrain. Every department has their own system for managing and storing content. We wanted to gain insight and expert opinion before selecting an ECM solution. An Info-Tech expert delivered a four-day workshop to guide us in the development of a strategy and roadmap. We really appreciated having Info-Tech help us develop a framework before we select the product,” noted Bourgeois.

Other initiatives with Info-Tech have included programs in data strategy and in RFP and contract review. Bourgeois commented on the latter: “Our contract and RFP model hadn’t been updated in years. We knew there were some gaps in our selection process, but we needed outside eyes to see our own blind spots. Info-Tech came in and looked at our processes. The most powerful thing was that we brought in our department, the purchasing department, and the legal advisory person. We all sat around the table and Info-Tech helped us walk through it. They helped us map out a process – something we’d never sat and done formally before.”

“Our contract and RFP model hadn’t been updated in years. Through the Info-Tech workshop, we brought in our department, the purchasing department, and the legal advisory person. We all sat around the table and Info-Tech helped us map out a process – something we’d never sat and done formally before.”

– Michelle Bourgeois, CTO, St. Vrain Valley School District

Learning, growing, and improving at every step

Never forgetting the goal of better serving customers, Bourgeois has also taken advantage of Info-Tech’s survey-based CIO Business Vision diagnostic tool, which measures business satisfaction with IT. In fact, Bourgeois’ work in this area led to an Info-Tech CIO Award in 2021. “The CIO Business Vision survey provided great external validation. The results pinpointed places where we could improve and do better. Our users thought we were doing pretty good, but we aspire to be great,” she noted.

As Bourgeois looks to the future, she continues to make plans to mature IT processes at St. Vrain in areas such as IT service management, automation, and security. She also plans to continue leveraging Info-Tech support: “Info-Tech has been a huge resource. We don’t know what we don’t know, and we want to build the right knowledge for the team as we advance. One of the biggest advantages of having a partner like Info-Tech is knowing that we have this cadre of experts that we can bring in to talk through our challenges and help us see pathways forward that we didn’t even know existed.”

As she has done from the beginning of her career, Bourgeois will continue to put student achievement and success above all else: “In technology and in learning, I believe that that we have an obligation to not just be great teachers in the classroom, but also to see what the world is asking of our students and help them prepare for that.”