Keith Wright has seen a lot of technology changes in his 24 years as an IT professional for the Ramona Unified School District.

When the director of Information and Education Systems first came to work for the school district in August 2000, his main duties were to support about 500 staff members with their tech equipment. Now he and his crew support 800 staff members and 5,200 students.

“We had minimal Internet connections and the people really weren’t using email that much,” said Wright. “Attendance, grades, scheduling and registration were done by paper. Now it’s all online. It allows us to import the registration data instead of having someone manually enter it, which has saved us days and days, and months of work.”

Wright has seen his staff grow from a network supervisor and two computer technicians to nine members in the Education Services Department — one network supervisor, five technicians, two data support services staff and one administrative assistant.

The number of devices in the district has also grown in that timeframe, from 500 to 8,000, including laptops, Chromebooks, desktop computers, telephones, intercom devices and security cameras.

Along with that, the number of tech tickets -– which students and district staff submit when they have a technology issue — has soared from 1,300 in the 2000-01 school year to 4,400 in the 2023-24 school year.

Wright and his department have been nimble about adapting to the changes, but he says a relatively small school district such as Ramona Unified often doesn’t have the budget to work with the latest and greatest technology.

Many of the changes were made out of necessity, such as implementing the Canvas Learning Management Platform – which helps teachers build assignments, discussions, quizzes and files digitally while providing a calendar of assignments and email to students – during COVID, he said. Canvas is now an integral part of the school systems, he added.

In the past 24 years, his services shifted from mostly email and internet to wireless and increased applications access. The district was slow to implement Chromebooks, he said, but now there’s a device for every student.

“Not everybody deals with change as well as others, but we are all in this for the same goal of student achievement,” Wright said.

Wright was ready to deal with the challenges created by the rapid expansion of technology. His goal when getting a bachelor’s degree in information systems in 1996 at San Diego State University was to help people solve their tech problems.

“I enjoyed working with computers and I enjoyed the puzzle and the logic of troubleshooting of the systems and networks,” he said. “That was what drew me to it, just that solving of the problem. It was kind of a natural thing to me.”

Wright’s first job in the field was working as a systems engineer for CompuCom, where he got experience with different types of systems, networks and servers. And it introduced him to various clients, including the Ramona Unified School District.

From there, Wright gained more knowledge of servers and networking related to Microsoft products while working for Vortex Data Systems.

When it came time for Wright to move his family — wife, Sylvia, and children Kristina Wright Huffman, 34; Ashley Kruse, 27; and Christian Wright, 21 – from Spring Valley, he said they chose Ramona. He said he had fallen in love with the area and schools while working for CompuCom. Shortly after they arrived in Ramona, his future position with the school district opened up.

“It’s a very good family town and I like the people, and I like the people in the schools, so I thought it was a really good fit for us,” Wright said. “I enjoyed living here and had three kids go through the school district. It was great. I got to participate in all of their sporting events. I got to see them grow up and be close to them, which is priceless.”

Another bonus is spending time with daughter Kristina Wright Huffman, who is the school district’s personnel manager, and son-in-law Bobby Huffman, the district’s maintenance and custodial supervisor.

Wright said he collaborated with his daughter to improve the onboarding process for teachers this year.

Teachers typically start working officially a few days before the start of a new school year, but unofficially they spend weeks beforehand preparing with training and staff development, he said. The new system got teachers set up with laptops, emails, sign-ins and other tech equipment about one month before school started.

“Everything is now done digitally so we are able to get information a lot faster and to set the new hires up in programs that we use to communicate with the school sites and all the departments,” Huffman said. “We could also assign students to teachers much faster than we have done in years past.”

Huffman has bachelor’s degrees in marketing and sociology with a full ride softball scholarship at the University of Notre Dame in 2012. After graduating, she returned to Ramona and worked as a college recruiting adviser and catching coach for PowerLine Consulting.

“After 17 years of playing softball I needed to take a change of direction in my life,” said Huffman, who started working at Ramona Unified as a personnel technician in 2014. “It was very serendipitous. I came to visit my dad at lunchtime and I told him I was looking for a career change. He pulled up the Human Resources website for Ramona Unified and there was a personnel technician position open. So I figured I would give it a shot and see if I liked it and if I would qualify for it.”

The assistant superintendent of Human Resources at the time was Tony Newman, who had been her assistant principal when she attended Olive Peirce Middle School and also principal while she was at Ramona High School.

“Knowing the person who I had an opportunity to work for made it sound like a really good job for me to apply for, so I did, and luckily I was selected,” said Huffman, who earned a master’s in human resources at National University in 2018. “Here I am 10 years later. You just don’t think about working in education unless you have personal experience with it. Luckily, with my dad working for the district for so long it gave me the opportunity. Without him I wouldn’t be here.”

Wright says he loves working with his daughter and considers it a blessing every day.

Huffman said the feeling is mutual. And she also gets to work with her husband, Bobby, who she met through their mutual friends a week before the COVID lockdown. Bobby was a student at the time and was interested in working for the school district.

“We pulled up the district website to see what kind of positions were available and he applied and got in,” said Kristina Huffman, adding that he was hired in 2021.

The couple have two boys, Bryce, 1 1/2 and and Blake, 3 1/2 and are expecting a baby daughter to be named Bailey on Oct. 10.

“One of the best things about working for the district is working with my dad every day,” Huffman said. “He is one of the hardest working, dedicated people in this district. He’ll do anything he can for the betterment of our staff and students.”