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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?"
I helped manage a mid-size district (2400+ total) with about 400 computers on the network when I was in high school. One thing that made it interesting was that the REAL admin was almost blind, and gone half the year for eye surgery. I remember a lot of manual labor. I was carrying cases/monitors/other items between 4 buildings most days. In the elementary school, when you go in you're a magician. If you're lucky, you step in during a snack break with a particularly generous teacher. In the middle school rooms, you're a nerd, and hear 12 year olds talking about their "skills" in fixing things. In high school, maybe you know some people, but still feel out of place. Teachers, for the most part, know nothing about the workings of their computers. They know their username and password (because it's written on their monitors) and how to check e-mail, and that's about it. They attract spyware like honey-covered shit attracts flies. Kids are pretty much harmless, save for physical vandalism to cases. The beginning of the year and right after Christmas break were crazy. Also, whenever they got a technology grant shipment was hell. 2 people unpacking, labling, and distributing 60 workstations in a day?! Not to mention clearing out old ones. Thankfully, the admin made network images of each model, and all the lab computers ran DeepFreeze. Things outside normal IT are explaining to very small children how the computers do and do not work. Although, it's probably similar in the real world.
I work for a fairly small school district in a rural community. As far as the managment of the systems goes, the lack of automation for things causes the most headaches. Other than that it's mainly sitting in my office watching the servers. Every now and again one of our drives will fail. Now, as far as things that bug me that aren't really part of my job go, the student management software is hell. It's poorly made and all that, but, even more annoying is that faculty doesn't know how to use it, and we get constant calls on "how do I set whatever code" and I don't really know. We paid to send ALL of our faculty to courses to learn how to use it, but not the IT staff. So, we have to tell them to just call the company. They get pretty upset when we say that. My manager is ... unique. He's one of the most shady people I've ever met in my life, and I grew up with drug dealers/addicts. He drives me insane. I'd say working for a school district isn't probably too much different than working in any other IT department, other than our customers are students and teachers.
I'm not a school admin, but I know some friends who are interns at some public schools. They claim it is the worst job ever. Besides being underfunded, they have to put up with all sorts of bullshit. Employees can get fired, students can't. Teachers typically don't watch the computers, so the vandals always get away with it. Filtering content is extremely important. They have to make sure nothing bad is on the network and the kids can't get to any questionable sites. The teachers act like students. When the teachers are being taught how to use programs, they act like students. They won't pay attention, talk to eachother, take cellphone calls, etc. The budgets are typically terrible. Though that is usually evident in the hardware. There isn't much to administer anyway. It doesn't matter if servers go down, etc. The computers will only have microsoft office on them in most situations. Usually you'll have a firewall, a mail server for the faculty, and then a file server.
Hey, I'm a former student a current employee of a large school district, and I think I can answer some of your questions:
... how do they know ... can they see everything we type?" They walked over to the technician who had controlled the computer and asked, "Can the district monitor what your computer is doing?" He smiled and answered, "They can monitor everything." Heh.
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?
One of the things that's a bit quirky, but not much different than most other IT departments is how the users are made to interact with the personel.
Often times you will get a teacher who has done something to their compuer that is outside the scope of the service agreement which the department has with the school, and then wants the IT department to fix it for free.
Because school districts work on tax budgets, our method of dealing with purchases and such is interesting as well. The IT department makes administrative decisions without consulting the school board, and thus, is not allowed, in any part, to be unionized.
We recieve a budget from the school board that we use to pay for our costs, (like buying parts or laptops or a new server), and then the schools, out of their budget, pay the general fund back for any services they buy from us. Certain services, (like internet, printing, etc.), are provided for free. Others cost the school money that they pay back to the district.
When is the most hectic/slow time for you?
By far, the most hectic time is September-November. All the new things that got implemented over the summer are being used for the first time, and things go wrong.
How big of a network do you manage?
I can't really give specifics... but its upwards a quarter million computers over a hundred or so square miles.
Also, do you have any favorite stories about being a school district IT admin?
We use Novell ZEN Works around the district, and by far, the most common misconception among users is that 'snapping' an application, (a network driven installation), means they no longer need the CD to use the program. *rolls eyes* We distribute applications, we don't crack them.
The students usually provide the best stories though. One of the onsite technicians was in a classroom removing sound drivers, (the students had been wasting time in class listening to things and the teacher requested we fix that), and noticed a student attempting to circumvent the security policy and reinstall his sound drivers. The technician remote controlled his computer from across the room and typed into the command prompt "Don't do anything stupid". The kids in the class gathered round in astonishment saying things like "they can't do that
FanFictionRecs.net
I was in high school (3 years ago) and was tapped by out district admin to help him, so I got to see what he sees from the viewpoint of you (the question asker). Here's what I found: Hectic times of the year: beginning and ending of every semester. Between the influx of new students that had to have user accounts and e-mail accounts created for them, and removing the ones that had graduated from the previous semester to keep the accounts right with the students in the district, those times were really straining. Also, the student grade/attendance system (STI, that piece of shit) would really put a huge load on our servers from all the data going in and out of it as well. Network size: We had ~400 computers in the high school that I was in charge of, that was 6 separate labs, and at least 1 computer in each classroom, most had 2. Then there were 4 big IBM servers and 2 smaller ones (big: district webserver, STI server, teacher e-mail server, teacher file server; small: backup file server, student e-mail server) You are also more than likely some form of tech support for every one that you manage. For one of my 4 periods a day my last three semesters at high school, I did the tech support and management stuff. Most of the time it was fixing problems for the faculty who had hosed soemthing up on accident, or fixing something a student did on purpose. It was fun doing the work. So fun, I've found the same thing at the university I am a student at, helping to manage another network, for the college that houses Computer Science and 5 other departments. Bigger network (4x), more headaches, but alot more leeway in what I can do, and something that may turn into a job offer when I graduate soon.
It's not that I'm asking the big questions, it's that I'm asking lots of small ones.
I'm sure it's a nightmare job, but the limited number of school admins I've encountered have not been up to the task.
/puts on flame-retardant suit
In one school district, the principals of each school got Windows laptops which were completely locked down. When one principal asked them to install an 802.11 card, she was told she wasn't allowed one because it was a security risk. This is the same district that turns OFF the mail server at night and weekends for security purposes. Heck, why not leave it off all the time, then?
In another, much smaller school district, users can't access the site for Bridge Construction Set - it's blocked by the NetNanny because it's a "gaming site." Because games and learning are mutually exclusive, of course.
I'm sure there are school IT admins who do it because they like working with students and teachers, or for the love of working in education. But for what school districts pay, if they're not doing it for the love of the job, or of the students, they are probably not up to the task.
Caveat - this is my limited experience, and there are exceptions to every rule. So if you're the exception to the rule, please don't take offense.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
The best (only!) way to survive adminning a school district is to convert every desktop machine to a diskless client., No hard drives, and no floppies on the desktop machines. (USB Key's are Ok for students and they don't have any moving parts or heads that need maintenance)
Stick one server in each room where there are more than N clients and make a subnet out of the room. N varies based on network speed, server size and typical client load.
Server is headless, keyboardless, mouseless, administered remotely.
Diskless clients almost never breakdown, and need very little RAM to run effectively.
All this concentrates your admin work to the servers and network equipment. (and replacing mice and kybds). And user accounts are more easily admined as well. Of course all user accounts should be managed on a centralized server/authorization system.
If licensing and managing licensing for all the servers and clients and user's email etc.. becomes problemsome or too expensive, all licensing concerns can be eliminated by using k12ltsp, a proven thin client system allready in operation at many schools in the USA and many other countries.
http://www.k12ltsp.org/
As a security auditor, I've audited College and High School networks.
Simply put: Wherein most organizations are trying to protect themselves from the internet - at a school district, they try to protect the internet from their organization.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
After college I did a year long stint as a sys/net admin a small upstate New York school district. It was really my first time being a full time admin and man was it crazy. It was a small underfunded school district so everything was done on a shoe string. It was only two buildings with about 500 computers but when I got there it was still a hubbed network [shudder].
However its really not that much different from working anywhere else. There might be a little bit more bureaucracy because its a public institution but that's about it. Computer networks are computer networks where ever you go. Some school IT offices get sucked into teaching computer courses (or in my high schools case the IT department came out of the computer classes). But most of the time I got to avoid dealing with the students thankfully.
It was a rather steady flow of work. There might have been a little increase in workload around grading time but that mostly was other people's problems. My biggest source of trouble was from poorly written educational software. That stuff sucks big time. I think its written by educators who become programmers.
Sorry I don't have anything really cool to write about, but its really just like other jobs. At least as long as you don't sweat the bull-shit.
700 computers, 9 sites, 2500 users.
:)
:)
Windows Networks, all sites see each other, user logins for high and middle schools, windows 5 domains, 40 macs in a lab at the HS, 5 computer labs, 15 servers.
Networks/domains already existed when I got there.
Special things:
student server folders: nightly scripts to delete mp3, zip(sit rar etc) and exe(dmg bin etc)
daily run of quota script and notification to "over/close to the limit" offenders
Funny things:
Middle schoolers taping nickels to cds and putting them in and leaving the library, as cd-drive sounds like an out of balance washing machine..
High school kid with keyloggers, and other various hacking tools in his folder: Excuse:
he was learning to be an FBI agent...
Teacher purchasing a server (got the funds and all), so she could have enough room for the studendts to put their video projects... then a dozen kids fragging their files because they were trying to edit 4 & 5 gig files across a 100m network
(server must not be fast enough) hehe heheheh.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I was a student aide in the computer lab last year, and managed to get administrative plrivelages for pretty much everything in the school. The district IT department, itself, is a bunch of incompetant controll-freaks. Schools certainly have interesting issues. The first is blocking all the naughty websites. To do this, they have the entire district (several miles wide) wired up to a single high-speed connection. Inbetween us and the web is a proxy server running their firewall. The firewall, though, can be bypassed by any motivated 15 year old, and judging by the fact that they havn't blocked Google Video yet, they probably don't care. Theres also the issue of managing the software on all the computers (eMacs). They all come imaged with an older version of OS 10, some remote desktop software (I had a lot of fun with that), a grading program that the teachers seem to complain about, MS office 2000, and (of all things) Dreamweaver and Flash MX. In order to install 3rd party software, drivers, etc. you need to file a request to the help-desk. If they aprove it (wich can take about 3 months) they e-mail you a password. Thus, we could not hook up our shiny new laser printers to our shiny new computers. Finally, When the district decided to get us these fancy 'smart board' things, no one had any clue what they did, much less how to use them, so they all sat in a corner the whole year. You'd think they might want to teach the teachers a thing or 2 on the technology, but no.
I have been in the education field, though not technically as a sysadmin. I have done a lot of my own system administration in at least one school, though, because the actual designated IT person was clueless and the security was so poor that I could change any setting I wanted.
For example, we had two computers in a teacher's lounge, one of which was connected to a simple inkjet printer. This computer got some virus, and the cure was apparently to wipe the hard drive and start over. I had nothing to do with that part. However, the clueless admin had no idea how to reinstall the print driver after messing with it for allegedly half an hour.
This was Win98, so there was no real concept of "administrator." I had to log in, but once on the system I could change anything I wanted. I was sick of the printer not working, so I poked around on the HP website, found the driver, and installed it. The whole thing took less than five minutes. The other computer was already set up to connect to this computer over the network for printing, so it immediately had print capabilities too.
About a month later, I was in this lounge using the computer and another teacher was using the other one. The "admin" walked in. The other teacher asked her some sort of question about printing, to which the admin answered, "Well, printing won't work because I couldn't get the print driver to install." The other teacher replied, saying that, no, she was able to print just a moment ago from this other program, just not from the one she was using. The "admin" replied, "Well, it must be magic then, since there is no print driver on that computer." I just stayed out of it. Later, I told the teacher (since it was one I trusted) what I had done, and she thought it was hilarious.
Frankly, in a lot of schools, the IT person is designated by an administrator. Quite often, that person is a school librarian that has a little bit of a clue how to do research and use programs on the computer, and that is it. Security is a joke most of the time.
What's worse is that what is often done in the guise of "security" makes computers practically inoperable. I can't even begin to explain the annoyances of the Novell "security" system for Win98 PC's (this was a different school system). No start menu; everything had to be accessed through desktop icons. File browsing on the computer was similarly prohibited, but all you had to do was open up, say, Word, and "open" a file. Then you could see whatever was on the computer. The proxy for "safe" web browsing was a joke; simply change your browser settings, and presto, you have a direct internet connection. I didn't bother because I had no reason to, but if a student had any knowledge of how to do this kind of thing, that student could easily bypass security.
As others have mentioned, the pay is pretty dismal, since if you actually are hired as a full-time system administrator with real qualifications, you could use those qualifications to get a much better-paying and more satisfying job elsewhere. So, as I said in the subject line, my recommendation is: don't bother.
Spring break and fall break are often not full weeks for us as administrative staff, so call it 5 weeks a year. So.... yeah, it's pretty nice :)
Did I mention during the summer we work 4 10-hour days (7 AM - 5 PM) and have 3 day weekends?
--- saint
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