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11-Year-Old Becomes Network Admin for Alabama School
alphadogg points out a story about 11-year-old Jon Penn, who took over control of a 60-computer school network in Alabama after the old administrator suddenly left. Penn provides technical support, selects software, and teaches his classmates about computers. From NetworkWorld:
"The first thing Jon found as he leapt into the role of network manager was that he had to map out the network to find out what was on it. He bought some tools for this at CompUSA and realized there was an ungodly amount of computer viruses and spam, so he pressed the school to invest in filtering and antivirus protection. 'These computers are so old they don't support all antivirus programs,' Penn says. The school took advantage of a Microsoft effort called Fresh Start that offers free software upgrades for schools with donated computers, switching from Windows 98 to Windows 2000."
He should have used open source and free software instead of going out and buying things. Norton and McAffee and other commercial anti-viruses are a nightmare. I've been using AVG Free for a long time, and it's top notch. http://free.grisoft.com/doc/download-free-anti-virus/us/frt/0
An 11-year old isn't legal to work, there are these pesky child labor laws in this country (duh).
The child labor laws don't stop you from hiring children.(tho your insurance might complain) They limit the types of jobs and the hours they can work. I have a 17 year old working for me at my store when she started she was 16 just above the cutoff point but still regulated as to what kinds of jobs she could do. She only works weekends for a few hours a day but it gets her use to the idea of getting to work on time and doing her job (well when she's not being a giggly teenage girl).
You can find the rules here:
http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/
"We spent $2,158," Why not go do everything for *free*, and save money in the future for not being trapped to antivirus subscriptions?
When you grow up, and start having to work with groups of people, you will realize the value of having a multiple points of contact for some things. 2k is nothing to know that if this kid is sick, dies, is unreachable or just moves on that the person who comes in after him or subs for him will be able to get support if something goes wrong without having to scour the kids notes on which version of which beta open source project he compiled on each system.
I used to do some work for a university that decided to go the free route to fix a problem. The only real problem with it was, only one person in the entire university knew everything about the free route implementation. If he was absent, any problems that went outside the standard scope that the lower admins were involved with went unanswered until he came back. On the other hand, any of the paid solutions we had at least had an 800 number for support.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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'These computers are so old they don't support all antivirus programs,' Penn says.
The computers are too old to support all antivirus programs? What does that even mean? To be fair, brand new computers do not support all antivirus programs either, since there are incompatibilities between various Windows releases.
Letting an 11y/o provide support and give advice for a network of any importance, regardless of how smart he is, will lead to many critical mistakes. The statement I quoted is a good example of this. The kid went to CompUSA, talked to an employee, and then came back to repeat what the employee told him. This isn't news.
My high school, due to a "budget crisis", fired all the IT staff and hired 2 IT people for the entire school district a week before school started. Yes, you heard me right: these 2 people were responsible for maintaining not only the computers for a high school with 2,000 kids in it, but also the 16 other elementary, middle, and high schools in the district. Basically, the main domain for the district is in the high school, and all the other domain controllers in the other schools connect via VPN to the high school.
They were horribly over-worked, and often the students suffered. For instance, they recently installed a new server, which required them to take down the old server and copy all the files to it... during the school day because the district couldn't afford to pay them overtime. So for a week we had NO COMPUTERS because the server was being fixed. And, whenever an issue were to happen at another school, the IT people would have to run over there, leaving no one to fix the problem they were working on before.
So many of the things the school makes them do causes all the issues. Like the Group Policy settings that restrict EVERYTHING imaginable, from the File menu to the Task Manager. This causes major headaches because students and teachers have to call them down to fix something because the Group Policy blocks them from fixing it themselves, like switching printers and program shortcuts, taking more time away from them.
I think he listened to me about the Group Policy though, one day they were less restrictive (although they were still very annoying, you could at least use Task Manager to end processes, which is very important because programs crash on those computers every day).
But if I were an IT person like that 11 year old, things would be different. Linux would be used instead, no expensive office programs or tutoring software, just open-source stuff that does everything the current expensive programs do, and decent support.
Sometimes the over-workness shows. For instance, in my middle school, I noticed that there were no security permissions on everyone's files, so anyone who knew how to load the Finder on the Mac computers and navigate to the servers (like me) could get access to EVERYTHING on them. I told the IT person about the issue, she fixed it in a day. But God only knows how long those files were accessible...
With kids learning more about computers (I learned basic computer stuff when I was 6, older programming languages like QBasic and Visual Basic when I was 10, Linux when I was 12, and C++ right now), why not give the kids who can be trusted these responsibilities?
School voucher system? Only in about half a dozen states, and they're enormously varied You appear to be in Florida, where as far as I know there is no school voucher system-- so a statement that private schools are paid for everyone else appears to be either ignorant or dishonest on your part.
And generally the school voucher implementations reimburse significantly less than the amount spent per student in public schools-- so if they were to enable a significant number to attend private instead of public school above those who would attend anyways, they'd actually increase per-student spending in public schools.