PM staffer honored with ‘Impact of the Individual’ award

Penn Manor School District’s director of technology, Charlie Reisinger, was honored today with the premiere of a video about his positive impact on the district’s students, teachers and staff.

“Charlie Reisinger: Impact of the Individual,” a short film honoring Charlie, premiered this morning at the Red Hat Summit, a global open-source technology conference that attracted 5,000 attendees in Boston this week.

Reisinger was instrumental in implementing a 1-to-1 laptop program at Penn Manor that is believed to be the largest of its kind in Pennsylvania. It uses free, open-source software that has saved the district more than $1 million in licensing fees and enables students and staff to tweak their laptops to meet students’ educational needs.

The program has been expanded to include more than 4,000 laptops at all Penn Manor schools.

Reisinger wrote a book, “The Open Schoolhouse,” about the program, which was the subject of a documentary by Red Hat Films in 2015. The film that debuted today is a follow-up to that documentary, which you can see here.

To see the new film, click on the image below.

Congratulations, Charlie, on your well-deserved honor!