Community Profile : Russ Hendrickson by Daniel Doherty
Russ Hendrickson is a man of many hats. He is Corvallis School District #1’s junior high wrestling coach and high school football coach. He is also the school district’s Technology Director and the Vice-Principal of Corvallis Elementary. Hendrickson has lived in Corvallis since his graduation from the University of Montana in 1994, and the story of how he came to fill so many roles is the story of fourteen years of hard work and dedication.
As a graduate in Mathematics, Hendrickson’s career in the Corvallis school system began with a dual role – the principal needed someone to teach computer literacy and programming as well as mathematics, so Hendrickson divided his time between the two subjects.
In the mid-nineties, the schools began to integrate computer networks into their existing facilities and ramped up technology education as part of the curriculum. According to Hendrickson, it was Tom Gallagher, the district’s first Technology Coordinator, who laid the groundwork.
“Tom started building the network,” Hendrickson said. “He built a good infrastructure, but there wasn’t much money in the budget.” Around school year 2000, Gallagher went to teach at the College of Technology in Missoula, and Hendrickson took over the networks in Corvallis.
It was to be a rude awakening. A week before the start of the school year, the networks contracted a virus that made most of the computers inoperable. “There were a lot of late nights,” Hendrickson said, “but we got through it and everything was back up pretty quickly.”
A levy approved by the voters in 2000 helped supplement the district’s technology budget problem considerably, and the schools now have about 470 computers in labs and classrooms. The size of the tech department’s job has increased astronomically since Hendrickson took over, and he now has two full-time IT professionals working with him to keep everything running.