By Beth C. Aplin
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Daniel Watts was going to get his MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania when his life got in the way.
A Brooklyn Heights native who graduated from Trinity School and Harvard, Watts was working at a consulting firm in Boston when he encountered the work of Tom Payzant, the acclaimed superintendent of Boston public schools from 1995 to 2006. Watts was also reading Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, the 1992 bestseller that exposes the unjust conditions and racial segregation in American public schools.
“It’s hard not to be mad about the inequalities that [Kozol] points out,” Watts said recently at a Heights diner. “I read other books too, but it was probably Savage Inequalities that got me the most interested in the problems that big city schools face.”
After three years of consulting work, the fresh-faced, blue-eyed Watts was accepted at the Wharton School, with the intention of one day working with a charter school company or a superintendent like Payzant. He paid his deposit and reserved his spot, but there was one thing he felt he needed to do first.
“I decided I would take a year and find something out about the public school system personally. It seemed important,” he added.
He got his wish in the fall of 1998 when the New York City Board of Education granted him an emergency certification, and he took a position as an eighth-grade math teacher at M.S. 258 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He estimates that when he arrived in October, the students had already gone through three other teachers.
“I stayed throughout the year and it was incredibly tough, one of the hardest things I have ever done. They were good kids, kind of hyper-energetic, but good. The school at the time was struggling in terms of scores but also in terms of discipline,” he recalled.
“It is hard for any first-year teacher, and it was probably unwise of me to go into that situation with so little background and training, but I stuck it out and learned a lot. There were a couple of teachers in that school that were just unbelievable, incredibly giving and talented people. [I remember] coming at home at 3 p.m. and falling asleep on the couch, just being absolutely emotionally and physically drained everyday.”
Watts, now 36, never got the chance to go to graduate school. Instead he is the co-founder and CEO of eChalk, a company that develops online communication tools for K-12 schools and school districts throughout the U.S. Formed in 1999 with Torrance Robinson (now Watts’ brother-in-law), eChalk has a presence in approximately 150-200 New York City schools and nearly 2000 across the country, according to Watts. Last fall, Deloitte named eChalk one of the 50 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications and life sciences companies in New York.
Designed to accommodate the particular needs of K-12 schools — such as parental involvement and the safety of minors online — eChalk strives to be a user-friendly platform that administrators, teachers, parents, students can all use to further learning and communication beyond the classroom walls. In a nutshell, the company provides a Web site for a school, an online classroom for teachers and a set of tools for students such as discussion threads and homework drop boxes. All updates and changes are made by the schools themselves and require very little technical knowledge.
Watts credits his corporate and his classroom experiences for leading him to eChalk. He knows from advising huge companies like MetLife and General Motors that communication is an integral part of any successful institution, and he knows from his days at M.S. 258 how difficult and time-consuming disseminating information can be.
When he was teaching, he was struck by how little computers were used, as well as how difficult it was to keep parents and absent students informed.
“That was the genesis of the idea: Can you create a really easy-to-use communication platform that makes a difference in a school’s life and in a student’s life?” he said.
Of course, the company’s products aren’t free. Watts said that in a mid-sized school of approximately 550 students, the cost of eChalk is about nine dollars per student per year, and that several New York City schools had applied and received federal funding for the service.
“The federal program covers about three quarters of that, so for the school it ends up being approximately $1,500 to $2,000 a year,” he said.
Prospect Heights’ Acorn Community High School, Park Slope’s P.S. 321, P369K (a District 75 school that works with special needs students), Fort Greene’s Ronald Edmonds Learning Center, and the Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant are a few of the schools throughout the borough currently using eChalk.
“Overall, it is very efficient and simple to use,” said Wayne Winston, a web designer and administrative assistant at Ronald Edmonds Learning Center. “We look forward to the new technologies that they will introduce in the coming months.” He said the most popular features of the site at the middle school were those that helped parents and students keep up with school activities and missed assignments, as well as the school’s online photo gallery.
James O’Brien, principal of Brooklyn Community Arts and Media High School (BCAM), said his school just started implementing eChalk this year. From a faculty and administrative standpoint, “It is a really coherent way to send intra-school emails to each other and the school community,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to use it to its full capability.”
One snag that has held back the site’s usage is the cost of the staff training sessions, O’Brien commented. “The trainings are pretty pricey, and we had to budget accordingly,” he said.
No one knows better than Watts that there are no simple solutions to the problems that plague public schools, in New York City and beyond.
“My goal when I left consulting was to have some kind of helpful effect, to participate in some way, and I think we do that with a lot of the schools we work with,” he remarked.
“I hope so; that’s the only reason I do what I do and the 60 people that work at eChalk do what they do.”
To see eChalk at work, visit www.ps321.org, www.p369k.org, www.relc113.com, or www.bcamhs.org.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
All materials posted on BrooklynEagle.com are protected by United States copyright law.
Just a reminder, though -- It’s not considered polite to paste the entire story on your blog. Most blogs post a summary or the first paragraph,( 40 words) then post a link to the rest of the story. That helps increase click-throughs for everyone, and minimizes copyright issues.
So please keep posting, but not the entire article. arturc at att.net
Main Office 718 422 7400
