Profile
Kay Tepera
Education Program Administrator
Arkansas Department of Education
When your network goes down, who are you going to call? Kay Tepera, that's who. APSCN, the Arkansas Public School Computer Network, is a school district's lifeline to the mother ship, and when something goes wrong, people start panicking. That's where Kay steps in to save the day and the data.
Kay wasn't always a network superhero, though. She started her career in education one night in college at 2 a.m. when she had an epiphany on the road to becoming an accounting major. If you've ever had a college accounting class, and you're not now a CPA, then you can probably relate. In any case, educating people seemed a lot more satisfying than balancing credit and debit columns. She changed majors and graduated from Arkansas Tech University with a degree in Business Education.
Her teaching career in Arkansas was cut short when she met a "dashingly handsome Texan", married him and moved to the Lone Star Sate. One of her first experiences there was with a cowboy-boot-wearing doctor who delivered her first child-not the kind of delivery room attire that inspired confidence. But everything went well, and Kay and her husband had two more children in Texas, where he managed a 22,000 acre cattle ranch and she taught business courses in various colleges and universities, until she made the decision to be a full time mom.
In the six years that Kay was out of the loop in technology, the world changed dramatically. When she left, she had been driving the old Model A of DOS down the road. When she returned to public education, as a business computer applications teacher at the high school level, she jumped onto the runway with Windows and had to scramble to stay ahead of her students. Five years later, she was on her way back to Arkansas with her family, where they settled down in Monticello.
She was anything but an expert, though, when she applied for and got the job of APSCN System Administrator and technology coordinator for the Monticello School District. "You know they were desperate," she says, "when they asked me in the interview 'What do you know about APSCN?' and I had to answer with 'What's that?'" She recovered nicely, however, and has been keeping the system going ever since. "I miss the day-to-day interaction with students, but enjoy what I do. I'm still making a difference in students' lives, even if only indirectly." With Kay Tepera at the controls, Monticello's rocket of technology is in good hands.