Analyze, Then Act

Profile

Shannon Ray vividly recalls walking into a conference at Apple’s San Francisco headquarters in 2009 with a team led by Matt Akin, superintendent of the Piedmont, Ala., schools.

“We were just kind of mesmerized,” says Ray, a board of education member in the rural district in northeastern Alabama. “We thought, ‘Goodness, this is what we need. This is what learning and education is.’”

Seven years later, Akin has guided the 1,250-student district in an unlikely digital transformation, not only of its schools but of the struggling former mill town of Piedmont. The district provides all students in grades 4-12 with take-home MacBook Air laptops, and a combination of in-school laptops and iPads for its K-3 children. The district also arranged affordable internet access in all of its students’ homes.

Before Akin began the one-to-one tech initiative called mPower Piedmont, fewer than half the families had access to the web.

Akin, 47, a lifelong Alabaman who has led the district for 13 years, says the technology push has transformed both the district’s breadth of courses and its classroom instruction. Almost all middle and high school students take at least one online course during the school year. Tenth through 12th graders don’t have to come into school at all during first period — they are scheduled for online courses at that time, although they can complete the work whenever they want.

Some 40 percent of 6th to 12th graders take an online course during the summer — perhaps partly because they get to keep their laptops over the break if they do. “It’s kind of a bribe,” Akin laughs.

Akin was featured as an Education Week 2016 Leader to Learn From, largely on the basis of his technology push.

Ray says the dramatic changes Akin has brought to Piedmont’s schools are the result of his relentless research. Ideas don’t get to the board unless Akin has analyzed them thoroughly. “All we have to say is ‘Yes,’” Ray adds.

Piedmont High School Principal Adam Clemons says Akin’s “visionary zeal” for helping students through technology has its roots in his childhood.

Akin admits to being “a little bit of a nerd” growing up in Hokes Bluff, a small town 16 miles west of Piedmont. As a preteen, he begged for a primitive home computer for Christmas and taught himself to program from a textbook his uncle found for him. His first teaching job was in computer science — in the same school in Anniston, Ala., where his mother was a kindergarten teacher. She was in the first of several computer training camps he ran for teachers.
(She was a good student, he says with a laugh, adding, “I still teach her occasionally.”)

His passion for education as a tool for societal change came from his parents. He recalls driving with his mother in her Volkswagen Beetle as she delivered Christmas gifts to low-income families of her students. And he occasionally rode with his father, a social worker, as he brought struggling children to foster homes.

“What my parents did was help me realize that education is important and that the world is a better place when you help each other,” he says.

Akin has seen Piedmont’s poverty rate steadily rise, with 68 percent of students now receiving free or reduced-price lunch. That is a part of what spurred him to dramatically expand digital access.

“We didn’t want our students to feel that they were trapped,” he says. “It helped kids experience success but also opened their eyes to the rest of the world. It seems corny to say it, but it gave them some hope.”