Harnett County Schools is on the Map!

Hello SAFARI Montage HD Network! Harnett County Schools is proud to join the SAFARI family. As a rural district in central North Carolina serving 27 schools and over 20,000 students, Harnett County Schools seeks to offer each of our dedicated staff members access to 21st Century Tools that will enable them to offer high quality, rigorous, and engaging instruction to our students. To this end, we are in the process of implementing SAFARI Montage and SAFARI Montage Live! across our district. We are extremely excited to be able to offer this wonderful resource to our staff members, and we are confident that our teachers will find SAFARI Montage to be an integral part of their instructional delivery.

As we seek to re-think the instructional methodology paradigm and expect our teachers to deliver 21st Century content to 21st Century students in a 21st Century classroom, tools and resources such as SAFARI Montage supports the broader mission of Harnett County Schools to prepare our students to be lifelong learners in a global community.  It is through such a movement that we can better prepare our students for the life they will experience once they leave our doors. Harnett County Schools has made it a district-wide priority to provide staff and students with every effective and appropriate 21st Century tool possible, and the implementation of SAFARI Montage fits perfectly into that effort. It also perfectly complements the recent acquisition of nearly 8,000 portable devices which brings our computer-to-student ratio to 1.15 - ranking us at 22nd out of 115 districts in our state and 1st among districts our size. Leveraging eRate funding has allowed expansion of our Wide Area Network to include a 10Gbps trunk with 1Gbps connectivity between sites, while federal Race to the Top funding has allowed deployment of comprehensive wireless connectivity throughout each of our sites.

It is our hope that these recent developments, coupled with the move to the Common Core and the new Teacher Evaluation Instrument, will create the "perfect storm" that will allow our teachers and students to reach new heights as we continue to prepare our students to be College and Career Ready! We are proud to be a part of the SAFARI Montage family and we look forward to sharing our successes!

Jeff Pittman
Chief Technology Officer
Harnett County Schools
jpittman@harnett.k12.nc.us