Todd Yohey

Oak Hills Local School District

Cincinnati, Ohio

Under Yohey’s leadership, school leaders have infused state-mandated core curriculum standards with career-ready skills. At a time of rising technology costs and declining budgets, Oak Hills is one of the first public school districts in Ohio to welcome the use of outside, student-owned technology in the school.

At Yohey’s direction, the district moved to a virtual environment, deploying VMWare View 4.5 on a Cisco and NetApp VDI architecture, enabling high school students to access essential curriculum and learning tools anywhere, any time, from any device.  Some devices were purchased and made available for student use to ensure equitable technology access.

District representatives have been invited to speak across the state and the country at conferences such as eTech Ohio, VMworld 2011, and the K-12 Technology Summit. The district also received the 2011 Innovator of the Year Award for the U.S. Public Sector from NetApp. Yohey models effective technology use in his own day-to-day work, whether it’s the wiki he created to interact with the board, using shared documents through Google Apps for Education, or using the district’s many social networking sites.

Oak Hills has implemented many ed-tech initiatives and pilots, such as a district-wide move to Google Apps for Education, increasing access to tools and collaboration while decreasing costs; student ePortfolios for K-12; online courses in health, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese; blended learning courses in world history, English, sociology, and introduction to engineering; a live online broadcast of district athletic events; and eZPay, in which parents pay fees and complete forms online.