Minneapolis school employees were hit on both the personal and professional levels by the sudden weekend death of David Mayor, the district's relatively new chief information officer.

The 51-year-old Mayor died Saturday morning, according to an e-mail from Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson. His death came less than a month after his sweeping presentation to the school board on July 10 summarizing his priorities for upgrading the district's information technology.

Mayor started Minneapolis work in January. and was in the process of moving his family from Rochester, N.Y. where he previously held a similar position for the city. He lived in Burnsville.

Johnson said she "admired David for his strong work ethic and passion for developing and implementing new systems" in IT for for classroom use and business operations of the district. She recommended and the school board approved a sizable increase in computer tools for the upcoming school year.

As the news filtered through the district, teachers at a workshop Tuesday at North High School on improving instruction were left wondering whether the district will lose momentum on some of the charges Mayor advocated with Johnson's support. Among them are a classroom-based system where teachers could quickly access data about their students and their strong and weak areas, a recordkeeping system for the district's new teacher evaluation system, a scorecard for measuring district performance on key measures, a system for partnering agencies to access data on students, new tools for better tracking of monthly financial reports, community-access computer kiosks and donation of old computers to low-income students. Some of those projects had a mid-2015 target date.

District spokesman Stan Alleyne said Mayor put in place a strong team who will be able to keep those projects moving forward.