LIFE THREW a wrench into Joshua Brown’s plans — ideas of numbers, data, and creation all woven into the career of an electrical engineer fell apart. Instead, the Florida native turned into what he swore never to become.
He then forever transformed the livesof teachers and students at a school district in Lebanon.
The Lebanon Special School District (LSSD) serves over 4,000 students from pre-K through eighth grade every year. In this district, Brown did not make his mark as a teacher. Instead, he served the teachers as the instructional coordinator, with a focus on data and instructional software.
After all, his upbringing ingrained the value of service into him.
Brown grew up in Central Florida as the youngest of three brothers. His father lived as a pastor, and his mother worked as a teacher in a classroom, where he would sometimes go after hours or on the weekends to assist her.
His mother’s field did not exactly push him to follow in her footsteps.
“Honestly, I wanted to be anything except a teacher,” Brown recalled, laughing. “My dream was to be an electrical engineer.”
He even received a scholarship for the U.S. Air Force ROTC. However, about a month before his debut, situations changed, leading the then-18-year-old to try substitute teaching — his entrance into the world of education. He served in various teaching roles while attending night classes at Warner Southern University until his last semester.
“So my journey into being a teacher was a bit of a reluctant one because I saw how much effort and time my mother put in, and I didn’t think that was the route for me.”
But his heart weirdly danced to the tap of the ancient chalkboard’s call.
Brown continued on to graduate from the University of Georgia for graduate school. Jobs as a third grade teacher and then a technology coordinator in Georgia followed before he became an employee at Pearson Education, which required him to hit the road often. He finally moved to Gallatin around 2008. Brown began forming a client relationship with Lebanon Special School District, opening the door for him to leave Pearson and work there.
“I wanted to be off of the road and not living in hotels anymore and wanted to come back to public education,” Brown said. “And I’ve been here ever since.”
In what Brown described as a unique background, he taught himself the skills that would propel the district to a whole different level. Before his onboarding, LSSD leaders realized the district failed in efficiently obtaining and organizing student data to properly outline goals for students, teachers, and administrators, so they turned to Brown.
He went on to meet those expectations.
Brown worked as the curriculum and support person for new instructional software programs, introducing them, troubleshooting, and training teachers on how to employ the tools to collect data. This eased the district away from manual efforts of excessively inserting and correcting information.
The second level of success involved Brown’s retransformation of LSSD’s student information system: the database housing students’ grades, discipline, attendance, registration information, and more. However, his favorite job component revolved around the tools he built surrounding data analysis after seeing co-workers duplicating their workload. As a remedy, he constructed tools from scratch with the Google framework, mainly using the Looker Studio to streamline information and a data visualization tool to make interactive data more accessible to help administrators lay out plans.
“It really allowed us to drill into data to be able to make informed decisions so much clearer and faster than we ever could before,” Brown said.
Teachers found the man easy to understand and a source of calm in a sometimes scary, technological world.
Although classroom instructors deserve a great deal of applause for a school’s success, LSSD’s tech-savvy administrator lives as an example of the great behind-the-scenes work required to create a strong backbone for any district.
People could say that he leaves behind a different type of classroom legacy — one that makes those legacies possible. GN
