GOSHEN COUNTY – Pete Cawiezel moved through the halls of Southeast Schools and Lingle-Fort Laramie Schools the morning of Nov. 19 at a pace that suggested he was busy, but not necessarily in a rush.

To teachers and staff at Goshen County School District No. 1’s nine schools, Cawiezel’s presence is a relief. As the district’s Instructional Technology (IT) support, he’s there to fix technology that’s been troubling them, whether or not they submitted a ticket with his department.

One educator likens him to “Superman.” Another tells him, “I appreciate you a lot, you know that?”

When they find him in the Southeast library, three staff members line up to pick his brain. Requests for wireless projectors, HDMI chords, instructions on running a virtual book fair and more pour in, yet Cawiezel doesn’t flinch. He smiles beneath his mask and he obliges.

“I’ll fix it,” he tells them all. And he does.

When schools closed in March and teachers, students and staff vacated school buildings, IT staff was there.

All of GCSD’s nearly 1,700 students now have laptops so they might easily transition between in-person classroom learning to learning remotely from their dining room tables if an uptick in positive COVID-19 cases renders such a move necessary. That was not the case at the onset of the pandemic in March. 

GCSD Superintendent Ryan Kramer said the district was moving toward one-to-one computing, but did not expect to do so in such a short time period. As the district prepared to deliver instruction online for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year, the IT staff accomplished in one week what was supposed to take months of training and a slow roll out. 

“We went from taking select schools that were 100% certain they want to be a one-to-one school to saying, ‘ok everybody, we’re gonna be rolling this out in a very, very short amount of time,’” Kramer said.

IT Director Bryan Foster said they had enough devices at the time, but the challenge was sorting them out and preparing them to leave the premises.

“During the time that everybody was home, wondering what they were going to do, we were here, getting all that ready to deploy,” he said. “And we keep track of all of our devices, so we had to rearrange our whole inventory to get that to happen.”

Now, as students and teachers will soon head into month five of one-to-one computing, teachers juggle in-person and remote learners, and the possibility lingers of schools moving to hybrid or fully remote learning amid an uptick in positive cases, the IT staff is still here.

Cawiezel said he works from 7 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. most days, sometimes longer. His job and those of the other three IT staffers entails more than making sure devices turn on and off.

They handle the school’s communications, from Facebook and Twitter posts to website updates, including the ever-important COVID-19 dashboard that tracks the number of positive cases in each school among staff and students.

At school board meetings, Foster ensures the democratic process prevails, meaning Goshen County residents can tune in via YouTube to watch and listen, and school board members who are unable to attend in-person still have their say via Zoom and a loudspeaker projecting their voices. 

When microphones fail or trustees can’t hear each other, they look to Foster to make it work.

Throughout the school year so far, meetings have moved between the small boardroom and the more expansive gymnasium to accommodate crowds amid the coronavirus.

“The only bad thing about the board meeting is when they move down to the gym,” Foster said. “Pete [Cawiezel] and I have to load up all the stuff, cart it all down there. And it’s not the best sound.”

As experts in technology, they help less tech-savvy educators learn how to effectively use technology in their teaching. 

Students and teachers don’t only have laptops at their disposal, as CARES Act funding has allowed the district to purchase new technologies, including 400 Ipads for K-2 students, roughly 50 Newline RS Series interactive touchscreen boards that allow teachers to juggle their in-person classrooms with their Zoom classrooms and they’re even waiting on the arrival of Ipad wielding robots that will follow an educator around so remote students have a more real classroom experience and teachers on the move won’t have to remember to periodically talk to the webcams on their stationary laptops. 

These devices, Foster said, can be an asset or an annoyance. For young students, they teeter a fine line between toys and tools.

“A lot of times people think, ‘give (kids) a computer, they’ll be smarter,’” he said. “No, you just gave them the biggest distraction they’ve ever had in their entire lives. If you hand somebody any kind of device like that and you don’t do it correctly, they actually go backward in their learning ability.”

It’s why Cawiezel sits with L-FL reading teacher Sheila Bever and demonstrates her new touchscreen board after wheeling it into the classroom from a utility closet. It’s why as his fingers tap the board’s various apps, she takes notes on a legal pad and asks questions.

“If we go remote, you may have to teach me some more,” Bever tells him. 

Cawiezel said he spends “a little bit more time” in school buildings than in previous years, with teachers and staff navigating so much new technology this year. It’s the fun part of his job.

“It’s been a new learning curve for us all, but a good one at that,” he said.

According to IT Clerk and Webmaster Anna Hytrek, the district has an inventory of roughly 3,500 laptops, 1,700 of which are out with students. Hytrek said schools and the IT department have been working together to deal with troubleshooting.

“It’s been good working as a team to make sure everything is going well for those kids,” she said.

Still, when Ipads, Chromebooks, Canvas and Zoom are fickle, Cawiezel’s job as IT Support to keep everyone connected.

Thankfully, Cawiezel appears to have the magic touch. 

“I do like it when things work,” he said.