Jody Sweeney

His wife dragged him to his first Levy Court meeting in 2006. Until then, he was not interested in politics.

He fell asleep.

A year later, he found out the towns he lived in—Camden and Wyoming, Del.—had annexed the land behind his home. The plan was to build 10 homes on each acre. That’s when he decided to get involved.

Now Levy Court commissioner, George Sweeney – call him “Jody,” also is Wesley College’s Chief Information Officer and runs the IT Department.

Sweeney, 52, was born when computers could fill a room, but as he grew, so did his passion for the technology.

“Now I’m a technology bigot,” he said as he pulled an iPad out from his bag. “I think technology is the best tool we have to fix almost any problem.”

Since Sweeney was hired in 2010, IT has installed Wi-Fi, and has gone from a 40Mb Internet connection to a 300Mb connection. The department has even managed to save the college $1,500 per month after this increase in bandwidth, after renegotiating the college’s contract.

Jody Sweeney

“Now students who are watching Netflix and gaming online are going to have a much better experience,” he said.

It hasn’t been all good.

One policy IT instituted included a filter that listed an arbitrary series of words considered to be vulgar. Several teachers cried foul, saying it was censorship and inhibited academic freedom. The policy was reversed.

Dr. Michael Nielsen, professor of media arts, has noticed a big difference.

“The campus has become far more wireless and the Internet is a lot faster since Jody came in,” Nielsen said. “This makes it a lot easier especially for media teachers who want to show YouTube videos in class.”

But these are not the only changes that the college has seen since Sweeney’s arrival.

Sweeney said he has changed policies on campus.

“We now have more of a focus on customer service,” he said. “When I first came here, they told faculty and staff how they were going to do things—now we ask. We engage them.”

Dr. Jeffrey Mask, professor of religion, philosophy and American studies, says he would rather see the IT Department make updates in the labs and classrooms instead.

“I would like to see some of the technology in class work better,” he said.

Sweeney says he has lived the change of computers from the beginning.

“I guess my first computer was an Atari,” Sweeney said. “I was a gamer.”

He did not show an interest in his field until eighth grade. His sister worked in data entry and used to take him to work with her, where he would “punch the cards.”

“That was my first intro to computers, and computers were big,” he said. “And when I say big, I don’t mean popular; they were very large.”

He never saw himself working with technology.

And sometimes it doesn’t work with him. Case in point, the two weeks that email was up and down on campus.

“Those two weeks were the biggest challenge I’ve had at Wesley,” he said. “We had a catastrophic power failure.”

The IT team restored the email as of the last back-up, repaired the batteries and expanded the storage of the email server.

“I guess they fixed it as quickly as possible,” Mask said. “There are a lot of hardware issues—probably software too—that come up, but I don’t see IT as much as I used to.”

Sweeney has access to a Virtual Private Network tunnel. This allows him to use his computer at home and connect inside the tunnel to his computer at work, which allows him to send out campus alerts during hurricanes and snowstorms.

“I can get inside the firewall, transfer my office phone to my cell phone, and my office computer to my home computer, and it’s just like I’m at my desk,” he said.

Sweeney said he has tried to enforce that members of the department should teach someone how to perform an IT action instead of doing it for them.

Computers and technology are not Sweeney’s only passion. He says family—his wife, four children, and four grandchildren, as well as his parents, three sisters and a brother—has always been a big part of his life, and according to his eldest sister, Cheryl Carter, coordinator of Wesley College’s Writing Center, so has changing policies.

“I remember when he was little, he was the poster child used to stop teens from driving too fast behind Rodney Village in the alley way,” she said. “They put him in a toy car and put him out in the alley. It went into the newspapers back in the Sixties to help change the way teens sped through there.”

A major turning point in his life occurred three days before his nineteenth birthday—his first son was born.

“It just forced me to grow up a lot sooner than most people,” he said. “Back then I was working for a retail store. Just a clerk stocking shelves.”

In his office, from the curtain hanging, to the picture on the wall, he is surrounded with a black and yellow – Pittsburgh Steelers colors – making his loyalties known, just as he does in his politics by driving his truck with a bumper sticker that reads, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican.”

Another milestone in his life occurred in 2007 when he ran for Kent County Levy Court office for the first time during a special election.

Sweeney recalls that until Election Day on Jan. 20, 2007, he campaigned outside in short sleeves because the weather was so nice.

“But the morning of the polling, it was freezing, raining, and snowing, with a wind chill of -10 degrees,” he said. “That’s why I lost. Democrats don’t vote in bad weather.”

Sweeney did win office the following year.

“Since then, I’ve been on the ‘every four years’ weight-loss plan,” he said. “I go to a neighborhood, park my car, start walking and knock on every door.”

After the first time he campaigned (2008) and knocked on nearly 5,000 doors, he lost 35 pounds. After winning his second term this past year, knocking on close to 35,000 houses and walking for 105 hours, he lost about 22 pounds.