John Lunt Friend of Technology Award

The John Lunt Friend of Technology award was established by ACTEM in 2006 as a way to recognize individuals that have

made a significant contribution to education and technology in Maine.  

The award is named after John Lunt - one of the founding members of ACTEM.  John served as president of ACTEM for six years and also chaired our annual MAINEducation conference for over ten years.  

John Lunt and former Governor Angus King were the first recipients of the Friend of Technology award in 2006.

Vince Vanier Receives the

2025 John Lunt Friend of Technology Award

The John S. Lunt Friend of Technology award is a special award that the ACTEM board gives on occasion to recognize a person who has made a long term, lasting contribution to supporting and advancing the use of technology in education throughout the state of Maine.  Unlike the ACHIEVE award, there is no application or nomination process, rather board members have a long discussion about who we should recognize and why. Our standard for selecting someone is that if you mention a person’s name in connection to this award to anybody who is involved in technology around the state, the response to that name should be “well of course!”

This year’s “well of course” no brainer John Lunt award winner is Vince Vanier from Madawaska.  Vince recently retired as the Technology Director of the Madawaska Schools.  He began his career as a classroom teacher, baseball coach in Madawaska expanding his role to the District Technology Director and baseball coach - taking the district from one computer in a classroom to 1:1 computing and WiFi throughout the district. 

Crystal Priest states; “I’ve known Vince for longer than either of us wants to admit and I know he has been doing interesting things in education for a very long time, starting back in the last century when we were both classroom teachers. Vince was already starting to have an impact on education statewide as part of the Pact 95-2000 Young America Cup Challenge.  He was one of the early Project SEED Innovators. Which also lead to him being one of the early MLTI PD trainers helping train teachers around the state.” 

In regards to MLTI and 1:1 computing, Vince believed; “You don’t have to be the dispenser of all knowledge on this thing. Students are going to figure it out as fast or faster than you on how the device works. You know how the learning works. You know how to facilitate the learning in your classroom, and this is just another tool to do that.”

Vince became involved in ACTEM and in 2006 he became ACTEM President.  As ACTEM President, Vince helped organize the first ISTE bus trip to the national conference - something that not only made a difference to educators across Maine, but also put Maine on the map at ISTE -  it seemed like everybody at ISTE knew about the Maine bus!

As President, Vince enthusiastically initiated ACTEM's application for a federal “Distance Learning and Telemedicine Grant” which provided $373,000 for “telecommunications, computer networks and related advanced technologies to be used by students, teachers, medical professionals and rural residents”. This was commonly known as the ATM network that provided video communication and high-speed internet to Maine schools.  An additional grant of almost a million dollars was received in 2009.  This system was the precursor to Zoom and Google Meet used widely today.

Vince was also involved in the start of the NEISTE Group - a collaboration of all the ACTEM counterparts in New England. We had a meeting in Kennebunkport -people from all over NE - Vince - from Southern Canada as Dennis Crowe used to say - won the prize for longest distance traveled and never left the state! For those of you who don’t know where Madawaska is, you know those two bumps at the top of the Maine map?  Madawaska is the one on the right. 

Vince has been “Keeper of the ACTEMlist” for over 20 years - since it moved from Betsy’s (a previous ACTEM Business manager) spare bedroom on a FirstClass server to the UMaine Listserv system. And given some of the epic discussions we had early on, he really had his hands full from time to time!

While Vince was President, ACTEM awarded the first John Lunt Friend of Technology Awards to John Lunt himself and former Governor Angus King to recognize their significant contributions to education and technology in Maine. And while Vince doesn’t think he is worthy of this award, those of us who have worked with him over the years recognize that he truly is deserving. 

As ACTEM President Mike Arsenault stated at the award ceremony; “We’re all replaceable. Some of us are harder to replace than others.”