Being School District Admin?

Bananatree3 asks: "I am a high schooler in a fairly large school district, and have always wondered what it is like to manage a large school network. What is it like to be a school district admin? What kind of unique things do you have to do that are outside the realm of 'normal' IT departments? When is the most hectic/slow time for you? How big of a network do you manage? Also, do you have any favorite stories about being a school district IT admin?"

Quick points

[pcgamez]

1) If you have good software that will handle the students screwing around (such as DeepFreeze or whatever).

2) Expect vandalism of the computers. All cases should be locked. All equipment rooms should be locked.

3) In general, the faculty has not a clue how to use a computer. They actually tend to be less teachable than the average person. If you have 50 faculty, 2 might be knowledgeable (as in, enough to build computers and such), 5 will not have to contact you about anything as they can fix it, and the rest will be nightmares.

Constant trouble

[Makatsuta]

I was a High School admin for a couple of districts. I found the students in the private schools to be the most cruel and demonic to computers. The rual students where more respectful. Bigger districts varied from OK to bad, but not as bad as private school. The worst I have seen is someone putting hot glue into a computer's powersupply to breaking of pencils inside the floppy drives. The annoying ones are the teens that pop-off the belt on the CD-ROM drive tray motor. The worse student to a computer is a teenager. I have fixed spam/bot/malware infected computers and in 15 minutes it would be trashed again. Teachers gripe because of the draconian methods I have used to control the damage students cause and have demanded restrictions be removed. What they don't see, is the budget the district gives for time and parts, which is virtually nothing. Everytime a student is given more freedom on a PC, the more expensive it costs to maintain it. The best environment I have seen for students is an all Mac setup. Virtually no headaches, yet schools want to run away from them. They just don't see.

Re:Network manager - 17-school K-12 school distric

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

(example: We blocked google images because there wasn't an easy way to prevent them from switching off the safe-search mode)

Just add "&safe=vss" to the end of all queries sent to *.google.com. If you have a proxy, there's probably an easy way to do this. Our school district implements this, probably through their Lightspeed Systems' filter.

Also unlike a company where as a rule sane adults realize they can get fired for surfing pornography, I have a few thousand middle and high school kids whose hormones are going nuts and often don't consider or care about the consequences.

Ask your school district if they'd consider implementing a username and password for each student, so they can put violations into the regular disciplinary system for "abuse of resources" or whatever else is in the student rules.