To Those Who Work in School Districts

I've got a question about organization in school districts. Ours is a mess and I wanted to get some feed back on what others are doing.

We have 10,000 students with 2,000 staff and 6,000 PCs spread out over 25 buildings. To support this we have 1 Supervisor, 4 Senior Techs and 5 Techs. 2 of our Senior Techs are in a Network/Systems Admin roll. We don't have defined rolls so we are expected to do everything and have Domain Admin rights to do it with.

Having worked in private sector IT I can honestly say this place is a mess. This can not be the norm for school districts.

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Comments

xenodamus

I worked in a school district, but not as an IT guy. I taught a high school vocational course called "Information Technology", though, so I had alot of contact with the district IT guys. Our district was probably half the size of yours and they only had 2 guys who were offically part of the IT department. They would hire on students or interns for portions of the year.

What you describe sounds similar to the district where I worked though. The 2 offical IT guys handled everything - network/systems/pc repair/web design..you name it.

chmorin

xenodamus wrote: »

I worked in a school district, but not as an IT guy. I taught a high school vocational course called "Information Technology", though, so I had alot of contact with the district IT guys. Our district was probably half the size of yours and they only had 2 guys who were offically part of the IT department. They would hire on students or interns for portions of the year.

What you describe sounds similar to the district where I worked though. The 2 offical IT guys handled everything - network/systems/pc repair/web design..you name it.

I was one of those students you speak of back in my highschool days. Every campus (6-8 thousand students, not sure how many computers... alot) there was one technician on site. I'm not sure how many worked in the district, but he and the vocational instructors and their students helped work through the school.

I also worked in a college system, and it was organized much better than what has been mentioned. Director -> Manager of Service Desk and a Manager of Systems -> Network Administrators and Server administrators under systems manager, and services desk techs under service desk manager. Then part time workers throughout the day. Also a 'system' level above the director including the CIO and some other VP's who make big decisions and get paid tons of money to seemingly not be available when you need them >.>

Other than that, great setup compared to school districts.

Zartanasaurus

30,000 students here.

Clearly defined help desk, field tech, network admin, server admin roles. OTOH, you have about as many people as we do on our IT staff.

NightShade03

eansdad wrote: »

I've got a question about organization in school districts. Ours is a mess and I wanted to get some feed back on what others are doing.

We have 10,000 students with 2,000 staff and 6,000 PCs spread out over 25 buildings. To support this we have 1 Supervisor, 4 Senior Techs and 5 Techs. 2 of our Senior Techs are in a Network/Systems Admin roll. We don't have defined rolls so we are expected to do everything and have Domain Admin rights to do it with.

Having worked in private sector IT I can honestly say this place is a mess. This can not be the norm for school districts.

You'd be surprised. I worked as a tech / jr admin for a school district and it was just as bad. We had laptops that couldn't hold the images we prepared because they were so old, switches in the wrong subnets, a horrible implementation of SCCM and a senior systems engineer who refused to let anyone help him or have access to anything. Job was mostly running around putting out fires all day and never getting around to the underlying problems. Lasted about a year before I ran screaming from that place (took two other techs with me

)

NinjaBoy

Slightly different in the UK, secondary schools (high schools) and primary schools (elementary) either buy in external support or have their own internal IT services team.

The School that I work at, we have (including myself) have 4 people in the IT Services department. This includes the IT manager (me), the Senior IT Tech and 2 IT technicians. With the amount of people in the team, we support the secondary school, 3 primary schools and one engineering firm. We deal with anything from 1st line to 3rd line support, eg responding to jobs where our users have forgot to plug in speakers (yes we have had a few of those jobs) to changing passwords to installing/upgrading domains and forests.

I do feel for the workloads, however it does sound as if some sort of best practice is needed, this is where FITS comes in. It's based on ITIL, however easier to digest and the end focus/emphasis is on the end user - rather than the business.

In fact we've had someone come over from the US already to do the FITS training (see Edugeek, the forum for IT Tech's mainly in education). Yes it is taking off in the UK at the minute, however if you consider that ITIL & Prince2 both started in the UK now look at them, it won't be long before FITS does the same thing

-ken

eansdad

NightShade03 wrote: »

You'd be surprised. I worked as a tech / jr admin for a school district and it was just as bad. We had laptops that couldn't hold the images we prepared because they were so old, switches in the wrong subnets, a horrible implementation of SCCM and a senior systems engineer who refused to let anyone help him or have access to anything. Job was mostly running around putting out fires all day and never getting around to the underlying problems. Lasted about a year before I ran screaming from that place (took two other techs with me )

At least you had SCCM we don't have anything for app deployment. I have to package any software into an msi and use Group Policy for deployment. I've found switches that weren't set up (fresh out of box to deployed), I have found cable runs over 460ft, drops from 1 room looped into the next ... this place is a mess. They tried to lay-off our admin but couldn't because of civil service rules so he doesn't care as much now. If the market wasn't as bad as it is and if I didn't have a family I'd leave but I kind of need the job for now.

NightShade03

I said we *had* SCMM I didn't say we used it (or that it worked for that matter)

Most of the time we used ghost.

I hear where you are coming from though. I took the job because it was the only thing that I could get coming out of school with no experience or certs. Took almost 8 months for me to find another job after that one.