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?"

Don't ask us

[Daxster]

Go ask your bloody network admin(s) what it's like. Much better responses, and you might get to help out, etc. Stripping cat5 is always good slave labour..

I was one for 3 years,..

[mobiux]

the biggest difference i noticed between normal admin and school admin, is that in a school, your worst users are actively trying to bypass your security and restrictions, and they can't be fired for it.

Re:You left out the question you really want to as

[Gyga]

If hypothetically your school is like mine then every computer is connected to a central server "F", and if like my school your teachers place their grades in an excel file in their directory named after the period number (F -> hallway -> teacher name/class number -> period) than is would be a simple matter of going to the library opening it up and changing your's. The hardest part is making sure you don't get seen by the librarian, and knowing which grades are which because they aren't titled. This will work if like my school every account, even the student account with no password, has write permission. I have not done this I have just seen my teacher enter grades and show an idot get caught by the librarian.

Re:Quick points

[Gothmolly]

They'll be worse than nightmares. "In this day and age" (to use a horrible cliche) to NOT know something about computers makes you a dinosaur, out of touch, etc. etc. No teacher is going to want this image, so they'll a) actively sabotage you and b) claim to know much more than they do. Expect this primarly from the mid-50s, "I'm just waiting to retire but I hate these computer almost as much as these kids", types.

Network manager - 17-school K-12 school district

[siredgar]

I'm the network mangler for a medium sized school system - 17 schools, 11,000 students, 3500 network nodes.

There are a few challenges that I can think of that deviate from what I encountered in the private sector:

1. Content filtering. Though you probably find content filtering of some sort at most companies, being in a school system I'm *required* to have content filtering by CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act) or risk our federal funding and thereby my job. Unfortunately the extent of what/how you filter is ill-defined. 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. Now, I'm a bleeding heart liberal and censoring by and large goes against my grain, but I believe preventing young children from accidentally being exposed to something they weren't expecting (whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov, for instance) is a good thing. However, if a pubescent child is determined to go looking I don't believe you can stop him from finding it. We could deploy draconian measures to stop it, but then you limit the value of the Internet (example: We blocked google images because there wasn't an easy way to prevent them from switching off the safe-search mode). We (IT) also bounce all requests to block a site that isn't obvious pornography to the curriculum folks for a ruling. That leads to decisions I don't always agree with, such as blocking plannedparenthood.com among others. Content filtering in a K-12 school system is a touchy business, balancing needs/desires of kids, faculty, parents, school board, and CIPA.

2. Funding/staffing. I used to work for the Family Channel. When a new IT project was floated, an adequate budget was attached and off you went. In the school system new IT projects come up all the time, often driven from other departments, but insufficient funding/staffing is attached to it in many cases. Work tends to pile on already busy people and so you get people who are very good at what they do yet they end up doing a half-baked job because they simply can't get to it all. We have a networking staff of 3 people to handle all telecommunications/networking/security (cameras) in the county, and for the 6 years prior to this July, only had 2 on the team. This is probably the most frustrating part of my job. We also have to deal with bidding procedures. Anything over $10,000 has to be put out to bid and approved by the school board. That makes something we might normally do in a few days to a couple of weeks (evaluate and decide to purchase a product) take a month or more. You also end up justifying an IT decision to people who might not understand the nuances of why the lower bidder isn't the best solution.

3. Atmosphere. This is why I work for the school system. It's *so* much more relaxed and rewarding than working in the private sector. Work in the private sector and you're making money for someone. Work in a school system and you really can give something back to society. It may sound cheesy, and certainly isn't my only motivation, but it really feels good to use your talents somewhere where chasing money isn't the goal. When the kids go "it's the computer man!" and light up when you fix their computer it's a rewarding warm fuzzy. I also get to work in jeans and comfortable shirts, work 8 - 4:30, get 2 weeks off for Christmas, 1 week for spring break, 1 week for fall break, 10 vacation days a year, 9 or so sick days, 2 personal days, and all the standard school holidays. My boss is fine if I want to go grab an hour at my daughter's school to watch her school play. It's a really personal life/family friendly work atmosphere. Of course, there are downsides as well -- for instance I often have worked over spring break or Christmas break to do things while the faculty/kids are out, but that's not unique to the school system environment. Just didn't want to give the impression it was all wine and ro

Re:Answers From A School District IT

[Pseudonym]

American Libertarian who doesn't believe in socialism....

No -1 Flamebait from me, but I do wonder why you work for a public school district.

Re:District Management

[darrell73]

I'd have to disagree with Breaker1. There is a LOT of difference between a bus/gov IT department and a school IT department. The main difference is oversight. In business, IT is given a clear picture of what it needs to achieve, with what support (whether that is financial, HR or policy/procedural). In a school pseudo-anarchy rules.....and that's from the teaching departments. Each department is its own little fiefdom and no one talks to each other. The most common occurance of this is where one department wants a "vital teaching aid" (aka certain software package) installed in lab. Timeframe for completion of this....45mins (basically one teaching period.

This presents one of 3 scenarios

1) You do it.......stress-o-meter reaches critical
2) You don't do it for legitimate reason, such as class is already using those computers so you don't have access
3) You try to claim some clarification from the principal about decreasing the stability of the lab image by installing softare ad-hoc. He/She takes department head and explains that this isn't done and procedures have to be followed.

HAH! For those of you who are laughing must have worked in a school IT environment as you all know that NUMBER 3 WILL NEVER HAPPEN. A principal putting in some policy benefitting IT and taking some power away from the teachers....cmon, you have to be kidding!

So you are left with two possible outcomes
1) You are seen as a angel by the requesting department for making it happen.....until you have to refuse the next time - then you are the devil incarnate. The spin off from this outcome means that more requests will happen from other departments because you can already make it happen so it has become SOP (Standard Operation Procedure). Of course if this install breaks other software then you are the devil incarnate.

2) You refuse - you are the devil incarnate. And don't try to justify yourself.....there is no justification from the devil incarnate. Of course the spin off from this option is that teachers talk and you become the entire schools devil incarnate because you are just not a "Can Do" person. Generally speaking once this happens, being fired or an nervous breakdown is very soon to follow.

So the biggest difference in business (at least those businesses that have a small amount of success) is that oversight from a manager who can broker requests like that. It isn't just the IT guy being difficult, but there is a procedure that can be followed that everyone (forced or not) can agree upon.

Anyway, enough of reminiscing (shudder, twitch, twitch), I did try to avoid being put into a scenario like this by being proactive.

At the beginning of term 4 (last term of the year here in West Aus) I sent out a memo to the departments asking them to list what software packages they will require in the new year. I also explained that this would allow me to test them all and ensure that they work. The response I got back generally was "All the ones we used this year, plus a few more for next year that we haven't nailed down yet". So I bided my time and with several weeks to go in the term I requested the same information. I was told that we needed all the ones from this year and not sure yet about the new ones. I followed up with the departments, ask them when they would know. I was told, "When we get around to it".

I'll admit at this point in time, I bitched to my higher ups about lack of co-operation and lack of planning being undertaken by the department. I was told to not be a whiner and to bend over and take whatever the departments wanted to use.

So I decided to play this out and see what happened.

I received requests for installation 3 days prior to the beginning of the term. 32 of them, 8 of which needed to be in prior to the 3rd day of term.

Frustration! Yes please! Care factor of management 0(zero).

Just another year.

*Please note that it was extremely soon after this that I left the school and have sworn NEVER to go back*

Re:You left out the question you really want to as

[jonwil]

Any school where students have even read access to the places where teachers keep their grades needs to fire the sysadmin.

Re:You left out the question you really want to as

[VxJasonxV]

More like lynch.
But I don't entirely disagree :-).

Re:What I manage...

[Lovejoy]

This is indeed a very, very good explanation. You are a terrific communicator. I'll bet the district folks love you. If you get tired of your admin work, you could definitely do technical communication/training.

I also note that you did not once call your clients "idiots," "morons," or the like, which seems to be a significant problem on this thread.

Re:You left out the question you really want to as

[saintlupus]

Any school where students have even read access to the places where teachers keep their grades needs to fire the sysadmin.

Yeah, because I'm sure that the school has a dedicated, well-trained sysadmin.

Whoops, looks like I mistyped "has a chemistry teacher working part time with computer shit he doesn't actually understand". Damned typos.

Seriously, have you ever looked at the payscales in public education? Anyone who could design and lock down the network properly is outside of their financial reach.

--saint

Re:I was one for 3 years,..

[Anonymous Coward]

My school's admin gets really pissed whenever you do -anything- that you weren't told to do. I've been suspended for installing portable firefox on my student drive...

Which means it's not that you weren't told to do it but that you violated your school system's Internet Acceptable Usage Policy or you wouldn't have been suspended.

I've done admin work for schools (K-12 and College) and I'm highly skeptical that you only did what you said you did and got suspended for it. The odds are your actions caused unforeseen problems that affected other users in a detrimental way, or you were doing more than just "installing portable firefox on [your] student drive".

The rules are there for a reason, not to punish you but to protect the computing resources for ALL users, not just one or two. If you break them you pay the consequences, and it's done to insure your classmates can still use the system.

What's really sad is you obviously didn't learn anything from the whole thing or you'd not be whining about it. I foresee a repeat in the future and with the history you have it will probably be a worse punishment next time.

Re:SD IT 2K

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Middle-schoolers do think they know everything. Don't necessarily discourage this by locking down your systems, but using deepfreeze lets them play around all they want, and once something goes wrong, reboot, and everything's golden again!

Unless you're in a Windows Domain and using a generic lab account and they fuck up the profile like no tomorrow. Suddenly login times jump to 30 minutes or more because they've been installing games into the profile (like into Application Data) because they can't install them anywhere else and they not dissapear. (We've had this happen, login times did indeed reach 30+ minutes at the worst point. The entire school ended up getting lectured about this by the principal things got so out of control.)

I wouldn't recommend encouraging them too much, we have to very actively fight them they cause so much trouble and we (or rather me since I'm the Network Admin) and the state spend a lot of time checking DNS logs and Proxy logs to see what sites have been hit that need blocking. You would not believe the sites these kids will try to access from the fucking computer labs! MySpace is the bane of most school admins existance as the kids want to get to it so bad they'll break laws if they have to and we have to do everything in our power to block them because they'll go and post personally identifiable information and stuff if they manage to get to it. I've spent whole days searching for Proxies that can be used and blocking them in our firewall and they still find more.

They think they know it all and they have absolutely no common sense, which is a very dangerous combination.

I actually have less trouble with not only the elementary schools but the high schools. The middle school kids are holy terrors. :(

Re:District Management

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand your frustration, but the point of having the computers is for students and teachers to use them. Your job is to do what they ask you to do and make sure it works, even when it's hard. Why stop at refusing to install software because it decreases stability, why not just tell the school administrators not to bother taking the computers out of their shipping boxes, since inevitably they're bound to break from student/teacher use/abuse.

Boy you can tell you've never worked for a K-12 system! Ideally that may be the case, in reality the teachers defeat themselves. Just this past year I had one school inform us three days after classes had started that they had purchased some new software and needed it in the labs by the first in-service because they'd scheduled the training from the vendor then. We weren't informed they were even considering buying this software prior to this and since they used their own funds (it didn't go through IT) we had no way of anticipating this. The software had to be tested first, not only the client side but the server side. We can't just slap some new software on the server without testing as if we take it down it's a Very Bad Thing. (Among other things it'd take the lab down completely.)

Let me tell you another little dirty secret about the K-12 market: Most of the software vendors couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, even with instructions and assistance. Software routinely assumes it will run under an account with full administrator privledges, getting it to work under a non-priveledged domain account is not supported so you're on your own. Even software that's smart enough to work as a non-privledged user will have nasty quirks showing they didn't test it that way. (The one I mentioned in the first paragraph will only install if you are logged in as local administrator. Only that account, not a local account with administrator privledges, it has to be an account named Administrator with administrator privledges. Then it sets it's security settings by default to only allow it to run by that account. Starting to see why testing is important?) It took me a week to test it (and a whole day of that figuring out how to get it to actually fucking install, the directions were as clear as mud and it wasn't straight-forward.) Fortunately that particular school never uses all the PCs in the lab in any class so I was able to work on a few at least every class period and the lab teacher was good to move students if needed so I could get my work done. That's the best case scenario, yet I still had to test all this and roll it out in under 2 weeks. Now let's move on to a normal case.

Yet another school informs us 30 days after school starts that they've bought several new pieces of software and need them installed in the lab. Again, no advance warning at all. This lab is a problem, a few years back a city system merged with the county and we inherited their networks. They used Novell, and their IT guys quit a few months after the merger, leaving us with absolutely no Novell experience on the staff. The other schools labs had been moved to new servers already and out of the Novell Tree, this school was slated to be moved over come Christmas Break. Additionally this lab uses all the PCs nearly every period so working on them during a school day is not possible unless the lab is closed. The principal and lab teacher refused to close the lab even for a few days as well. Result? We ended up with three work orders a month apart but were simply unable to do the work until Christmas Break. Whose fault was this? The school's, mainly the principal's and the lab teacher's. They didn't notify us before school started (if they had we could have put a rush on the changeover and gotten them moved to the new server so we could install the software for them sooner. If they had been willing to close the lab for a week (which isn't that big a deal actually, other schools have done this without it affecting their kids' progress)