Leadership Lessons on Confidence, Technology & Building Better Leaders | Dr. Chad Stevens

But it's exciting because I think we talked about it before the podcast.

It's a tough time.

And schools are struggling.

And I was a former school chief technology officer.

I've been a principal.

And I've been through some pretty tough economic downturns.

But I don't know if I've ever seen it like this.

Yeah and that's come through pretty evidently in some of the conversations we've had on the podcast and obviously with a whole bunch of schools that are desperate for solutions that are going to enable them to do more with less and that's what we've tried to lean into but at some point budgets just don't always align with their desire and it doesn't matter sometimes how much they can even say or see how much they're going to save or time they're going to save.

If they don't have the money, they don't have the money.

And so I thought this would be a really interesting conversation for us to just, I don't know, spitball a little bit as innovators and people who are really passionate about the K-12 tech space.

that, as I said before, if we're not offering something that is highly valuable and affordable, we really don't have any business being in this space at this time and place where I have never seen, as you said, economically as many pressures in K-12 in North America than I have right now.

I mean, I've only been doing it in the US for 15 years.

You've been seeing it from the time you graduated and started teaching, so...

Of course, this is year 30 for me in education, so obviously I didn't really think that much about budgets and things when I was in the classroom.

But even when you go back then, I look at how much stuff that I bought for my own classroom in 1996.

I basically... was funding a lot of the things up in my classroom.

I wrote recently about how I brought a laptop into my classroom in 1996 to show kids bones and muscles.

Well, it wasn't the school laptop, it was my laptop.

And so I think this financial pressure is, has been there for a really long time.

I mean, I think that's kind of the problem, right? Schools have always had to operate for less money.

Now it's like kind of really over the top and it's really starting to impact you know, the ability to continue out their mission and the mission of schools and their communities, I don't think it can be understated how important it is for schools to function well for kids and for, quite frankly, for our country.

You know, we're coming up on our 250th birthday.

I know you're from Australia, but like the thing is,

is like, it's part of the democracy, right? To have really highly functioning schools so that we can kind of continue.

And I think that's, that's a, It's a really interesting time.