[geeks] Thoughts on IT work in public schools?

[Lionel Peterson]

Experiences vary, I did 5 years in K-12 public education, and my experience
wasn't bad, some of the contradictions can be fun to watch...

Block offensive images - we can all agree that typically involves porn pages
and perhaps certain fringe politics websites, but I've seen parents complain
about bloody images that their children could see. When we explained it was
not possible to filter on image content, the parents refused to believe us.

(It is a requirement that all web traffic in publicly-funded schools be
filtered.)

Or when a parent anted students to have random email addresses because a
predator could see their picture in the paper, be attracted to the child, and
send them emails based on their first and last name. (For example Mary Jones
would have an email address of MaryJones at school.edu). After explaining that
the email addresses needed to correlate to actual names to be useful, the
demand was made that all email addresses have a random 4 digit number added to
them (MaryJones6538 at School.edu) because how could that ever be figured out...

Funding where I worked was/is good, but the waste at year end to 'spend the
money' lest next years budget be cut got upsetting.

The workflow is not bad, every summer school classrooms are broken down and
equipment is replaced, according to age. Any needed upgrades also occur during
the summer, so that during school year the department is in break-fix mode,
while preparing for next summer's upgrades.

My district had a five year life cycle, but to save money the board pushed for
a ten year life cycle. Z they ran screaming from that idea when they started
watching what were now 7 year old systems failing. They assumed because they
could use a 7-10 year old computer at home, that it would last as long in a
classroom... They forgot their children don't hammer on their home computer 8
hours a day, 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year...

Now they are flipping from shared classroom computers to shared iPads, to now
chrome books... It all depends on the articles a few influential teachers
read.

School IT is pure 100% overhead in the eyes of educators, it steals money that
could otherwise go toward teacher salaries.

That said, I'd go back to public K-12 education, I feel I can spot a
dysfunctional department and avoid it.

Lionel

> On Apr 16, 2014, at 11:14 AM, Nathan Raymond <nraymond at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone with any experience working IT in public education?  I'm
> contemplating it as a future career move, and I'd love to know more from
> people's first-hand experiences.  This job would be managing the
> infrastructure to four grammar/middle schools and a high school.
>
> While I've done work in private education (my first paid job was IT work
> for the prep school I went to many moons ago, and I did VAX and UNIX admin
> work on the side during my computer science undergrad years, and I've done
> some IT consulting for a few private schools recently), I have not dealt
> first hand with a public school (and never went to one, either).  I'd
> expect there to be a lot of politics, and potential budget issues.  I know
> they tend to have unions as well.  Anything else I should be aware of, or
> to look for?
>
> - Nate
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