Billy & Dee-The Wizards of Wifi

No more pencils. No more books. And the only dirty looks from teachers will be if you forget your chromebook at home. The modern classroom–from elementary through high school–has continued to evolve due to an ever changing technological world. While some schools might’ve been content to stop evolving with typewriters and the abacus, preparing students for an ever-changing workforce falls upon the shoulders of Maple River’s technology coordinators Dee Stencel and Billy Vait. One of the first steps in kicking off the 2025-26 school year is the distribution of the “wonder-tool,” the Chromebook. “That's my goal as a tech person,” Dee Stencel explained, “is for them to walk in and their Chromebook is here and ready to go, and their online pieces, while they might not know how to get into them, but they are ready to go. ‘I did know about you. I did have you ready.’ And that's one of the big pieces of August, as well as getting all those resources for our returning staff and students, but also for our new staff and students.” While Stencel gets each new and returning user loaded into the system, it falls to Billy Vait to make sure the network and devices are healthy and operating efficiently. “I'm kind of more of if you're having a mechanical issue or if there's any hardware failures,” Vait explained. “Usually that's kind of my role. I have several things that I've been working on to just to keep teachers up and running in the moment and get a cable there, but in the summer, I can reroute that in the wall and fix some of those issues and go through so those are some of the things that I've worked on. Otherwise, for the most part, any hardware issues, I do help Nikki (Quiram) on the maintenance side, a little bit with lighting issues and some other things too. So I kind of get to touch a little bit of everything, wherever they need help. I just help coordinate it a lot of times.”

Since being introduced a decade ago, Chromebooks have been changing and improving with each year and model. Keeping up with these changes can be a daunting task. “Everybody always wants a nicer machine. But for the most part, they do the job, and it does do what the students need. Even with Google as a software for the workspace, (the part that we manage on that backside), there's a lot of pieces that are changing, and it's not always the same. It's constantly changing and evolving and moving. As far as even the software: what's available, what they give you, what we have to pay for, or how they manipulate the packages” are choices Stencel must make for the school. “Google did change a bunch of stuff on us this year, so we're working through some of those things. As soon as we think we got something figured out, Google does an update–and we don't have that figured out anymore.”

Artificial Intelligence

One of the more divisive concepts in recent years is Artificial Intelligence, which can regurgitate essays, create digital evidence that a dinosaur ate your homework, or give the answers to any question imagined. Needless to say, the days of typewriters and the abacus are long gone. Because of its short-term and long-term implications on education and the workforce, Stencel and Vait are also trying to surf this wave back to the security of shore. As Stencel explained, “I'm just gonna start with it's exciting to know that we have an AI policy that's going to be in place this fall, and so I think our students will have a better guidance on what the expectation is for Maple River schools, and that has to be a good feeling for parents. I know for our staff that it will be a good feeling that we have something in place now as we move forward.” 

Vait views AI as a long-term development that will have impact for years to come. “I think

AI is really important moving forward just because it is not going away and it is getting better. As these students move on into the workforce, some will be expected to even use AI in certain jobs to be more productive. It's fairly new, and it's evolving all the time. So as we introduce these kids to it, maybe we can focus them on how to use it properly and in a better way. Not in a negative way, but it can be very helpful too. Like a calculator in the classroom. I was always told when I was younger that you're never going to have a calculator with you, and that is just not the case these days. So everybody has a calculator in their pocket.”

BACKGROUND

To stay ahead of the curve for technology, both Stencel and Vait rely upon a network of others. “I think we're fortunate to be part of a larger tech group in the south central area, and so we have meetings like every other month, and we talk about things that are going on, things that are happening at their schools versus our schools. We share a lot of different things that way. Billy and I had the pleasure of going to Brave Wave conference last year, and that was out in Wisconsin, and that is all the latest and greatest, and that's exciting to see. Are there improvements we can make? Absolutely, there always is. But we're not too far off from what the expectations of Maple River are at this time. It was kind of exciting to see that. I think another big thing that you know is the security of technology. We've implemented some new things this year to help us be more secure.”

Although both Vait and Stencel are on the cutting edge of change, neither of them had training to prepare them for technology; instead, both rely on problem solving and critical thinking. Stencel’s path began with teaching at the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where federal funding gave her all the cutting edge technology. When she came to Maple River in 1999 as a classroom reduction teacher, she saw how the district was lagging behind the curve. When her classroom position was eliminated, Principal Jim Bisel unleashed her talents in the technology department, which is where she’s been since. Back in the day, we had AR (Advanced Reading), and I would get mailed a disk, and then I would go around to each individual computer in the classroom and put that disk in and install the new tests that you could take from your book, right? And so I do that. I go all around the Minnesota Lake building, I go all around the Central building. I go all around the West building. And the online presence now is pretty incredible. From my perspective on the things that I do, if there's no internet today, it's a pretty rough day here for me at work.”

Vait also began with a much different role than he currently has. After graduating from Willmar Tech College in electronics, he found the focus of the industry shifted away from repair. “There wasn't a lot of need for electronic troubleshooting to a component level. It was basically board level, and we throw it away and it's done.” Yet his understanding of electronics and technology brought him a new opportunity with Hawk Alarm in Mapleton, where he worked for almost 15 years. For the past four years, his knowledge of both hardware, software, and security technology made him the perfect complement to Stencel.

WORKING TOGETHER

With their roles clearly defined, Stencel and Vait nevertheless frequently cross-over into helping the other person when things become overloaded. Their offices are located off of the high school media center, which puts them near the center of the academic and athletic facilities. With a decade of seniority, Stencel took the office with a window and a western view of the school campus. Vait, on the other hand, had the smaller, windowless room. While there was no tension in this situation, practical issues drove them to modify the situation. “Billy is fortunate to have two offices,” Stencel explained about the desk mirroring her own. “So we work fabulously together, but I have the window view office, and he does not have the window view office, so he comes over here and we're working on a project, and then he'd sit down at my desk to continue working on a project. And pretty soon I'm like, ‘I got things to do too.’ So finally, I'm like, ‘just set yourself up a computer, just put it right here on a desk, and then you can do your thing, and I can do my thing.’ While he still needs his space over there, (because you need your own space), sometimes it's worked out really well, because when we're working on projects together, he can sit over there and do his thing or be on the phone or let me run over there quick and do this and then run back. It's worked out really well, just to have the space right here where he can sit down and do his thing and I can sit here and still be on my machine and not have my tabs closed or something.” For Vait, not only is he able to communicate with his technology partner better, but it also allows him to get a bit of Vitamin D away from his windowless room. “It is nice to have two spaces. It's very nice to be able to work on a project. She's not lying about how she has a better view than I do. So I do like to fix Chromebooks on the table right over there (at the window).”

THE NEW BUILDING

One of the first challenges for their teamwork was to create a brand new network following the move to the building for the 2023 school year. While Stencel had experience of working in four different buildings and already knew the Google Chromebook system, Vait was able to start with a clean slate as he learned all the quirks of the new facility. “I think the biggest challenge was getting the building up in line and ready to go for the new school,” Stencel reflected. “I don't think we underestimated what we needed to do. You just don't realize how big of a project that is to have to go room by room to make it live.  For your phone and for your board and for all those things. And that took a really big chunk of the summer. And I think a lot of those things went well. It just took a lot of our time. So the things that we normally would do during the summer, obviously, those weren't the things that we did that summer. I also think some of the parts of the building weren't quite ready for us, and so then we had to wait on that. And so those are probably the things that during the school year, then we had to wait till we got the go ahead to complete those projects, and so we were ready. But the building wasn't quite there yet, and some of the pieces weren't all falling together quite as streamlined as they wanted it to be. But in the end, our building is absolutely beautiful, and it functions fabulously.” 

In comparison to the summer of 2022, the summer of 2025 proved to be quite pedestrian, with the largest project being bringing the new rooms, fields, and buildings up to speed. “For teachers, we upgraded everything. They're stopping support on Windows 10, so I moved everything to Windows 11 this summer,” Vait explained. “So we had to touch all the computers, and that was a little bit of a task. There was a lot of time involved to make that happen. So that was one big project we did. We also had some construction going on at the complex. At the track, I added an access point out there. There's a few things I've been working on with the new grounds building. So I still have some more stuff to do for that. But, yeah, big chunks.”

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