What is it like to work for a school district?

I'm working in healthcare and have 0 days off. I make good PTO, but its up to you to decide how to use it. You have to ask for holidays, etc.

There are these jobs that resemble our K-12 lives. Summers off/all holidays!

Some school districts around here advertise 240 day work years with 26 paychecks and the pay is just as good as a regular scheduled job.

Anybody here have any experience with this schedule? Is it as awesome as it seems? Should I apply apply apply?

Few posts down someone made me realize 240 days is based on 5 days a week and the dream is just that a dream.

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Comments

Reibe

I haven't heard of any school district where IT has that schedule. Most people think that IT and other staff are gone for winter/spring/summer breaks, but typically the Summer time and the other breaks are when you have a chance to work on large projects or upgrades since there are less people around - it is the busy season (40+ hour weeks at times). There are some holidays off (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc), but still work on some others (MLK, Veteran's Day, etc).

I can't speak for all districts, but all of the public school districts I am familiar with are like this. I guess it could be different on really small districts or private schools or maybe based off of position.

Edit: Grammar

Danielm7

240 days is 48 full weeks, that doesn't equal summers off. Every person i've know in school IT says summers are when they get most of their big projects done.

kohr-ah

i dont know about schools but i worked for a college dorm for a few years and above is basically what it was.

Summer time we took the dorms and turned them into a hotel. Therefore I could do a lot of projects but had ot make sure I was done in time for the people to come back and use our locatiion as a staying place.

Winter was when I did a lot of projects because EVERYONE but like 20 kids (well.. i called them kids) went home for the holidays.

Budget was so so. If I could show that the things I needed was for a valid reason then they pretty much went for it and i was seen as the goto guy. Overall it was a good job.

I have a 2 friends who do IT for colleges and a perk they have is they go to class for free. So they basically are geting their bachelors and masters at no cost.

Queue

Danielm7 wrote: »

240 days is 48 full weeks, that doesn't equal summers off. Every person i've know in school IT says summers are when they get most of their big projects done.

I don't know why I didn't think of that. More than likely no summers off. I guess I didn't think to do the math and realize that 5 X 52= 260. Those 20 days are probably all you get. I earn 6.5 hours a paycheck so I'm actually having 19.5 days off too. Thanks for the math!

TWX

Summers can be hectic if the planning was done right in the lead-up and the projects are actually ready to start. The biggest crunch-time is the first four weeks of the school year after summer break when all of the staff plays musical-rooms and musical-devices, and there's usually some extra load at the beginning of the calendar year when everyone returns from winter break. It's also busy at the end of quarter or end of semester times.

The rest of it depends on the number of staff, the role management plays, and the complexity of the environment. If the environment is simple and relatively static and was implemented sanely to begin with, if management restricts goal-meeting projects to reasonable amounts, and if people take care of their own areas of responsibility then even a very small number of staff can take care of a lot of equipment, but if the environment is complex or not securable, or was poorly implemented, if management constantly badger staff to meet busy-work goals to make themselves look better, if people slack-off such that others have to do their job plus someone else's job, then it can be rough.

Generally public-sector employees earn more vacation and sick time than private-sector employees. School districts usually have some amount of time off at the students' winter break, have some days for other breaks (or partials, get two days when the kids get a week between quarters) and observe the federal holidays. On the other hand they earn less salary and can often be pidgeon-holed into jobs for a decade or more at a stretch, and there isn't a lot of recourse if someone else isn't keeping up with their responsibilities. But the retirement can be good.