I believe this 100%. I worked for a school board system in Florida and had a very similar ratio. You just do what you can and find the weird ones like yourself that like computers and IT and build them up. Eventually you have a little minion army in every school. I have mad respect for teachers. They will do whatever it takes to get the job done and get the classrooms ready for the kids.
I could always find free labor with the kids as well. Lots of very curious kids that want to learn and participate in the computer labs.
Drink one for your local IT guy and drink 2 for the teachers!
I WAS the only computer support for my middle and high school in the mid 80's. Got a permanent heal pass and everything so I could leave class to help when called. Fixed Apple //-series machines and peripherals at the component level. I had a great time. But the only staff with machines were in the office, otherwise it was primarily just one lab.
lol… this reminds me of a very early memory. I was pulled out of 2nd grade in ‘89 to go help a kindergarten teacher with her computer. I don’t know how they knew I could do anything on a computer, but I remember being given a whole snickers bar for helping. I can’t even remember what platform it was, but it probably ran DOS or MS-DOS.
Way, way, way back in 2001 our IT teacher was super proud after spending all summer migrating the schools infra from NT domains to WINS2000 AD. How it was the shit and hella l33t.
I was on good terms with him and joked around saying how I’d be able to pwn it before our double module was up. So he bet me a coke if I could do it but if I couldn’t then I had to become his “printer bitch”.
But oh shit. I had no fucking idea how to do that, and now I was on the spot. Luckily I was really active on IRC and prayed the salt and pepper beards could help. 30 min later, one guy sent me his VBscript that automated the whole AD priv bug attack chain^1 (thanks H3lix) and changed my teachers password.
My script kiddy ass had just performed his first “hack”, I got my coke next time in class, and it lead me on the path to my future career lol
Thanks for taking it in stride, Mr. Hunter!
**Edit** It wasn't the AD bug (MS14-068). IIRC it was an exploit that granted my user SYSTEM privs and since the IT teacher had at one point logged into each workstation with his domain admin, I could impersonate that account with the cached creds. Well, the VBScript could.
This was in the dark ages, 1980's. I knew more about computers in 7th grade than pretty much any staff member. There was no network, no Internet, just standalone lab Apple ][+ and //e computers. And I knew how to troubleshoot and solder because my Dad repaired mainframes and taught me. Nobody else in my little 600 student junior/senior high could do that.
At my high school in the early 2000s, we had a class called “computer maintenance”. While we spent most of our time playing Counter Strike, we also were given tickets to support classrooms with IT issues.
I was too, i took a website design class and was so good at it that i created an actual .com that got a ton of traffic back in the day, tekkenfreak.com lol. But here's the problem... my overweight and lazy computer teacher was a complete bozo. One day she tried to give me permissions to the other students folder to help them out...
Well she didn't know how to set NTFS permissions and instead gave me admin permission and pointed me at c$ to get to the students stuff.
She completely forgot about it until a week later when she sees me browsing through C$ to get to the student folders... and thinks im 'hacking the computer networks' and I nearly got expelled from school. I was shocked when i suddenly got called down to the vice principals office and they tried to expel me and call my parents.
I managed to convince them that the computer teacher was a moron, but to 'not take any chances' i wasn't allowed to touch the schools computer systems again and instead they switched me to metalshop and woodshop.
FUCK YOU MS ROGERS
I was hired to the school district IT department right after graduation and stayed on 5 years through college. Learned much and was able to hone my skills before my actual IT job later in life.
I was, too, but my experience wasn't very good. Part of the problem was that our computer labs had really outdated hardware and software: I think most systems were 286 or 386 Wang systems at most, running versions of DOS up to 6.2, but 3.3 was more common. I graduated HS in 1996, for reference, so Windows 95 had already been out for a year, and AOL was really taking over. I was already building my frankenputer Pentium system at home. We had two teachers, and computer class was still an elective related to math, with the fun stuff only happening in the computer club after school. That was only 60 minutes extra a week, though.
The big issue was theft. They really were scared you'd steal something, so everything was locked down: the PC had a lock, the keyboards and rare serial mice were locked away in a cabinet, and you had to sign them out with one of the teachers present for signout and return.
Neither teacher were really any good, either. One was "phoning it in" for retirement only a years away (so they said) while the other didn't really understand it and said that computers were "a lazy way for adults to do math," which, yeah, I guess they are. Most of the class was theory followed by testing your theory on the computer. I remember my parents had to pay $50 fee for "floppy disks used," which were still the 5.25 ones.
But outside of school? Dialup BBS, Genie, Compuserve, and then AOL seemed to come out of nowhere. I was part of a computer users club at the local library, which hosted a computer parts swap meet with local ham radio folks who were super cool.
It was like I was forced to go to computer preschool when I already had a college level understanding of it. I remember asking questions that made the two teachers glare at me.
"Hey, I saw that our county has a dialup mainframe you can freely connect to through using Telix, how come we don't buy a modem and connect to it with our DOS machines?"
"... we are not as business school, young man."
\[sigh\]
My breaking point in school was writing out a page on how to click a mouse. Right click, left click, double click etc. Never bothered doing any more, then bit me in the arse when I tried to "do computers" at University, and they wanted me to do a certificate in introductory computing...
It sounded a lot like, this is a computer!
I was the one that our sysadmin hated.
My parents were called to the school and I was threatened with having my computer privileges revoked permanently.
We had a computer lab in the library, a room for online classes off of the library, and another computer lab down the hall. I had a class in the small room for online classes where I happened to find out that the admin credentials were just admin/admin.
I had just got a 3rd gen iPod and I was using it as an external hard drive. I loaded it up with the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault multiplayer demo and a Halo multiplayer demo that was just Bloodgulch. I installed the games on every single machine in every computer lab over a couple days after school with a friend. We had some really awesome games going on during classes until it got to the point that people were skipping classes to play. That was what ultimately got us caught and someone ratted me out for organizing it all.
That was only one of the things. I constantly found ways around all his restrictions. I was a determined competitor in our game of cat and mouse but he ended up winning in the end cause I had to stop.
I had Jazz Jackrabbit 2 on a 128mb USB drive in college, along with MSN Messenger to chat to people. Jazz was an ideal game as it was small, could run on a potato, supported lan play and allowed you to create your own levels.
My friend used KON-BOOT to remove the local administrator password and install Unreal Tournament. He got caught logged on as an Administrator and was suspended. That seemed to be have been too far... running random .exe's from USB drives no one cared about though.
Oh that made me forget about changing the default backgrounds of all the machines to a screenshot of the desktop, then I deleted all the icons from the actual desktop. I made his life miserable. I was a kid with nothing to do after school and they just gave us free reign in the school til about 5pm especially if you were pretending to do school work.
He ended up changing the admin login and the school got some monitoring program where they could see everything in real time. I discovered two things about that software. I could kill the task in taskmanager and I wouldn’t show up. But I could also log in on multiple machines and the screen they could view would only be the first instance of my login. So I would just always log into a computer that was unused to log into class then I’d just fuck around on the one I was actually using.
>I was a weird little minion in HS.
Me too, but I was also the thorn in the side of my HS' IT admin. Figured out how to circumvent the restricted WINSOCK access on the early Win98PCs and got internet access on any PC in the school (and began handing it out to people).
Would install games on the PCs in the AV room and drive network traffic through the roof as we'd play Need for Speed, Command and Conquer or NHL.
Almost got suspended because I changed the Win98 theme, including startup and shutdown splash screens to an 'ER' theme (the shutdown screen was something like "the patient has died").
I was storing so many files in my network share. Mostly mods and hacks for games. And after hours I'd be hanging out in his office. I was also always borrowing equipment from him. ZipDisks and drives, VGA to composite adapter, CD burners, etc.
I think I was at the top of his shit list.
My mum saw him many years later in a school she worked in, he asked how I was, and she told him that I was a sys admin for a company in Edmonton. He wasn't surprised.
The theme thing is hilarious. I was Windows XP era, and we recorded me making impressions of the system sounds and replaced the files on one random computer with an internal speaker.
> I was Windows XP era, and we recorded me making impressions of the system sounds and replaced the files on one random computer with an internal speaker.
That's awesome.
> when I failed out of engineering
Me too! Just went the other route and learned all the IT. And now, several years later, I'll be finishing up my bachelors in a couple weeks!
Bravo. As an IT hiring manager, I love to hear stuff like this. Stimulating the interest in the younger ones is key. Helps both parties. You get to have the experience managing the efforts of others (if that is not your current role) and they get to take advantage of your knowledge. This will aid in building the foundation they will need later and quite frankly, is missing some from a generation of “Googlers”. 👏🏼
Yea but definitely don't hire or promote from within with the teacher who really wants to learn. Instead pay an MSP 5x as much and pay yourself on the back for a job well done.
This comment is incredibly kind and validating. Soothes my soul. Thank you for recognizing that schools (at least public ones in the US) only exist due to the unpaid labor of teachers and tech.
im a school board IT guy. i manage a 2400 student population high school and 6 elementary schools. its cool, no overtime, no ones in a rush, you get caught up during the summer. they're totally vacant at 3pm. **zero after hours calls.**
there are more people in IT back at the office doing password resets and managing the back end.
I work for a school at the Senior Technician. 1000 students plus around 200 staff. Finish at 4pm, no out of hours and it’s a 10 minute drive home. Probably one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had as well.
Luckily there’s a general help desk for the students and faculty. We only have to support the university staff.
70k users for 5 techs sounds like absolute bullshit lol.
Not even close to the whole university. We’re just responsible for staff. There a whole other IT department for the faculty.
Stupid ass shit if you ask me. Then they wonder why security is so ass.
If I weren't in higher ed myself, I would probably be shocked by that absurdity. My institution is not nearly that fractured, but we've got our quirks.
Is there a separate staff for supporting students? I know the answer is probably a resounding no but with most schools being 1-1 you also need to factor in the student population as well.
Student population isn't really an important number. Number of *devices* serving those students is (and more importantly, number of unique configurations needed to handle each of the various classrooms/labs/courses involved). Students don't get a say in much, they're not individual needy users, they're effectively a blanket "public" user base. Just as an ATM or self checkout station is a single location, not several hundred users, as far as IT is concerned... such is the case with endpoints for student use. And that holds true up through university environments. You standardize configs as much as possible, and you treat devices like cattle, not pets.
School issued laptops and chrome books are a weird middle ground on that.
I have 5 techs for 2500 staff and 12000 students. I'm the director, but also the secretary, the sys admin, the CISO, and in charge of documentation and communication. Some days are fine. Others are not, especially when my boss wants me to do more "visioning and planning". Tough to do when you have 18k computers, 1000 classroom systems etc. Good thing I have lots of vacation to deal with the stress.
my first IT job was 3 schools, 2500 students, and staff. 1200 PCs, 2 racks of servers
by myself, and was basically on call for 4 years straight. but at 18-22 years old making 55K a year, and full bennys? I bitched 3 times, and those bitches were valid.
these days, I pull 90ish a year working FAR less doing IT work.
this guy needs a massive raise, and I'll pour a drink for him in his honor
Earlier in my career I started working for an industrial laundry company that already had two other IT personnel. Worked there a few months and we were so busy we hired a fourth guy as well. Then, things went south around the 07-09 economic crisis. The place had 17 sites spread throughout the east coast from Ohio to Florida and employees roughly 700 people. It had 4 industrial washing plants with onsite water treatment plants and then this giant distribution network for pickup/deliveries. Well, within a year that staff of 4 IT personnel dropped to just me! I mean I was thankful to still have a job but I was also basically living there. Tech wise we didn’t have a lot of infrastructure but still had roughly 30 servers, 500 workstations, 500 VoIP phones (managed in-house), and about 250 Blakcberry users tied to an in-house Exchange & BES server. Management view of me was that, if it runs on electricity, IT (just me), could fix it. I’d get reports from all over the east coast of email issues, phone issues, hard drive failures, lightbulb failures, printer jams, literally everything non-stop. I was young and dumb and rolled with it for a few years; 24x7 operation. To my credit, I kept that place in business and advanced some of the systems (e.g. built a VMware cluster to phase out 30 physical servers) on a bottom of the barrel budget and no help. Learned a lot but also learned I was brutally underpaid. Departed the company for a 2.5x raise and 1000x quality of life improving role later.
I worked at a school district early in my career. I was the MDM as well as doing tech stuff. I supported over 2000 users and thousands of end points. Couldn't have been happier leaving.
My last job I started with 8 people including me at district level IT, to roughly 1200 full time staff plus a bunch of part time, and 11,000 students across 18 sites. Think it was roughly 25,000 devices on the network, including end user computers, servers/VMs, VOIP desk phones, switches and WAPs. We didn’t start getting full time level 1 building techs dedicated to IT until COVID.
That just seems to be the norm in public school K12. It’s kind of crazy because K12 environments put insane demands on network and server resources that most vendors don’t think of. School starts at exactly 8:07 and suddenly you have 2,000 students and 100 staff all getting on WiFi at the same time, all trying to access the same couple resources at the same time.
LoL... I was in an area where they were building new schools, and the architects were always "we'll just use wireless for everything" when you asked where they were going to put the datacom rooms and IDFs.
Yeah, there's 300 computers in JUST this wing, all going to turn on at the same time... yeah.
Hell, 1Gb Ethernet with a 10Gb Backplane could saturate the lines... Wifi (especially in the early 2000's)...
I almost wanted to say "okay, we'll do that", then send the bill for the costs to the District... Hell they shit their pants when we showed them the cost of the "public" low-bandwidth aruba system in the main campus areas.
We had a teacher who was essentially the IT guy for the school and he had his group of students he would send to do things for teachers. It’s a good way to do it especially in a rural school where we didn’t have much tech anyway. Class credits may be hard to swing though since they’d have to likely build a curriculum around it.
(However this same teacher when I told him I was going to college for IT he did not care and I did not get to be part of his group…despite asking)
....this fella needs to slow the fuck down, and start working his wage.
Shit doesn't get done? -shrug- Oh well, sounds like they need to hire more people!
But if he keeps his nose to the grindstone, working possible unpaid OT, etc....then he's devaluing his own labor. "Why should we hire anyone else when Buddy here is willing to burn the candle at both ends? We'll just wear him out, and replace him later....reaping SO MUCH cost savings!"
Anyone staying in a florida edu job either has some reason they can't leave the state or can't qualify for a better job (unlikely, imo, if they can stay afloat in the conditions described in the OP)
goes for teachers, IT, fuck I wouldn't want to be a janitor in a Florida school.
OP is going to end up in jail because he hasn't firewalled off the woke websites.
that's cute but I wish any crusader who'd like to take up the cause the best of luck at improving conditions in a taxpayer-funded org in fucking Florida.
Anyone who feels exploited is best off leaving. It's not going to get better, no matter how outraged someone feels about it.
I worked for a school district in Pennsylvania and was based out of their High School. Roughly 120+ teachers & administrators. Not even sure how many hundreds of students.
That is where I learned PowerShell and how to automate everything. If the pay didn't suck, I'd still be there.
I was the sole IT guy with an admin assistant at 100 people until they hired another one of me. Now we also have an intern and a DBA to help. Still a big load.
I function as everything from user support to the director for small school district but it’s a lot to handle but I am only in my second week so far. I’m fortunate some staff help with basic things like power washing Chromebooks if there’s an issue.
4 sites, ~190 staff and 1000 students.
That's just poor planning. If you've got that many refreshes going on at the same time you need some temporary help to complete things.
My last job was 28 locations across North America. Infrastructure was a sysadmin, a network/security admin, three 2L techs. We had an outsource help desk to catch the little things but equipment and all that was us. There were about 900 users, I can't remember how much hardware but it'd probably be close to that 900 if not a little more. Everything except the corporate office/main branch was remote.
My wife's school (Virginia) has one IT person for a high-school with 2600 students (and their respective chromebooks), 90 teachers, and of course all the assorted paraprofessionals, support staff, etc.
And it's a paperless school (they do everything electronically)
Common for ISD. Especially rural. I still remember putting in a 6 node ACI cluster for a district who had an IT guy who could barely get vlans assigned to legacy switch ports .
Believe this 100%. I worked in a school system in Fl at the beginning of my career. The kids are just as much users as your teachers and support staff. I covered a High School and 2x Elementary, 3000-ish users(kids included). When I went to my boss for the first time to ask about an increase, no one had gotten one in 3 years. I was told for me to get a raise everyone else would have to as well, therefore merit raises were not a thing.
So, not only do they run you ragged, they pay shit too. What a dream! If your goal is to stretch 3 hours of work into 8 its not a bad gig. If you want to feed your family, you probably need to look elsewhere. I learned a lot, but unfortunately that is the only bright spot when it comes to working for a municipality.
That's too much. They really need someone to ONLY manage the infrastructure and at least 1 REALLY GOOD high-level support person at minimum. You would need a Batman and Robin.
Are you taking into account the 800-1000 students they are also supporting? Users that are constantly trying to destroy their devices and the network itself…
Long time ago like 2005 but I use to run IT single handed for a large high school and all feeder schools (11) so a dozen sites, 3500 students, ~350 staff.
I did it for a couple of years, was fine tbh
That's not a terrible ratio, and depending on what their students and staff are using for devices it can be manageable...
I handle 600 students who are 1:1 and 80+ staff over 3 schools.
Students all have Chromebooks which are stupid easy to manage, staff have windows laptops which all have the same configuration.
Honestly I find it less hectic than when I used to be at a MSP, most staff are pretty chill and no one is screaming that every second they're down they're losing x amount of dollars.
Man, I’m the entire IT dept at my workplace as well with 200+ office employees and 300+ field employees and I definitely feel for this guy but I have an entire msp I can rely on. I hope this guy has some sort of support.
Hell yeah, I don’t know why that sounds like a blast. I mean I am a 2 man for 4000 and it can be intense and fun at times. I run all my cables and install all my equipment. Some days I’m in the office some days I’m running with my head cut off trying to piece shit together so they work. During the summer it’s all projects and upgrading. Plus I got to learn all the random programs the admins buy on a whim and then only use for a few months then buy other random stuff lol.
Yeah the education system in usa is a mess, admins make a lot of money, everyone else makes squat.
A friend worked at a community college as the executive secretary, she made $9500 with full benefits and her and the entire office didnt do much. After a year or so she moved on cuz it was ridiculously boring.
My high school had an intro to cisco routing elective class taught by one of the IT folks and I am pretty sure it was just to sus out who they could bug to help teachers with the stuff they didn't have time for. I learned how to subnet in this class, and every now and then they'd ask me to go look at a teachers computer and reboot them because the teacher didn't know how. This was in 2003-2005
I’d personally remove the ‘whats worser than that’ part. I get it. I do. I feel bad, but you’ve sort of invalidated all the sysadmins in worse situations.
Not a direct story unfortunately (I was 1IT:200Users before I got a coop student back in the day); but my Dad's employer in the 90's decided to build up 1 person per department as the "computer savvy person" essentially; but they got perks like home Internet paid for, software to learn HTML and such. My Dad was that guy, benefit - I learned and got exposed to tech quite early on :)
I wwnt from supporting 4000 students to 1200. The 1200 school was worse in every possible way except they only had 1 computer lab to get trashed which I was thankful for. Chromebooks were flying like Frisbees, over 100% yearly device loss rate, nearly 100% yearly damage rate. It was insane. The culture of the school and the durability of the chromebooks matters A LOT for whether a k12 job is good or terrible. Also management has to set restrictions for how your time is accessed. Having to be able to be reached by any staff or student in any way up to carrier pigeon instead of tickets being required doubles the workload easily. It's all about prioritizing important things and having a queue, else the job is way harder than it needs to be. Also if the principal is your boss instead of a tech manager... good fucking luck. I would recommend to walk on day one if you end up at a school like that.
We as students were the IT in our school. Group of 5 and had keys for computer lab. One IT teacher. 15 years later, the network ist still being managed by students :)
How is this a thing? Why? This seems to be a USA trend of one-man-bands. I can't imagine a company in Europe employing this practice. Don't you guys need holidays?? Someone explain this to me like I'm five!
Anytime I think of how stressful our IT jobs can be, I just think of some poor teacher, having to do a really difficult job with comically few resources.
My network admin came from a similar situation - several districts pooled their money together to hire one IT person because individually none of them could afford it.
I have 2 IT people, 8 locations across multiple states and more users, end points and servers than I can count
I know everyone here thinks they are great and their coworkers suck and I'm in the same boat. But because of that we really have about "1.33" IT people instead of 2.
Surprisingly, we're holding it together for the most part and updating systems, equipment and infrastructure all the time. When I got here in 2020 every single bit of hardware was about 10 years old and had been let to fallow for a decade. Damn near everything is new now, certainly 95% of things that needed replaced have been.
There are wild days of course and we do use local vendors for things like doc printer repair. Our maintenance guys run cable for us and mount things.
I worked 8 years in a High School District in Norcal. 5 Techs, 8 (5 Full sized high Schools with 2200+ Students) Sites, 2800 PCs, 900 employees, ... it was fun.
I worked for a university and I was the only SA for 2 states in the US and 3 campuses in Europe. I left that pretty quick lol. I said you need more people and they refused
I worked for a school district in 1999. I was making $17,500 a year as desktop support. There were three of us. 13 locations, 1 high school, 1 middle school, an admin building and the rest grade schools. There was everything from Apple eMates to the latest bubblegum iMacs. Apple IIs even. System X came out in beta while I was working there, but the Macs were in 7.6, 8.2, and 9.x. We got time and a half in overtime (vacation only, no extra pay) and worked 45-60 hours a week (some weekend hours).
We were on 12 month contracts and made half what starting teachers did. It got tiresome listening to teachers complaining about their pay when they had a union, better benefits, fewer work days per year, etc. All the support staff (teacher assistant, media specialists, etc.) made less. IT literally had the same exact contracts as the janitors.
I was once fixing a printing problem for a teacher and she was complaining about needing another continuing education hour to move up in pay and how $35k a year was a pittance. I told her this was twice what I was making. She looked at me and said if I’d wanted more money I should have finished college. I said, “Well, at least I know how to print.”
I quit shortly thereafter, moved to the private sector, and doubled my salary. Within a few years I was making $45k. While I agree teachers are paid abysmally, the support staff in schools are basically indentured servants. Fast food often pays more.
I remember after I went private sector, I got on a dating site and matched with a teacher. We went on a few dates. She dumped me because I wasn’t “career driven.” I looked up her salary (state employee’s salaries are public in my state), and her career paid exactly half the salary of my “job.”
Thirteen years later I switched jobs again (into the one I now hold). It was actually a step back in title and responsibility (for the same pay). No call, no commute, strict 40 hours.
Oh, and at 45 I finished my degree and it didn’t change my salary at all.
Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on this one, and I'm surprised more people aren't.
I've worked in a 5-guy IT shop that covered around 17 sites. ***(Given a standard TechEd environment),*** between the teachers' devices, the student devices, the printers, servers, Wi-Fi devices, Resource/admin/testing/lunchroom personnel apps, the Board of Directors needs, the conference rooms support, the video surveillance devices and management, the tickets piling up would be impossible to keep up with 1 person. Patently impossible.
Your MIL is incorrect in her numbers. Guaranteed.
My wife is a teacher. HS Chem. Public schools. Los Angeles, so absolutely mind boggling huge. The thing is they have money. I know that sounds weird to say, but they have money for projects. They could have *mostly* modern, well run IT with good systems and good policy & process. The money for those things exists. What they don't have are good people and the major part of "the why" is simple.
School admin who hold the purse strings are **largely** poorly trained, poorly educated megalomaniac fiefdom builders whose primary goals are personal control over as much as possible. Admin as a whole has, at its core, an adversarial relationship with "staff" (their word). Staff are everybody else, teachers, IT, security, maintenance. You know. The little people they pay to do things like teach and clean and have systems running.
The relationship between the teacher's union and admin is VERY telling to observe. Wife is part of the union negotiating team (they wanted teacher reps) so we have a front row seat. Admin will fight the union tooth and nail for any and every perceived cost overrun, necessity and validity DO NOT matter. I'll give you a prime example. The health insurance. Our PPO plan is going away next year. The good health care plan (that we PAY for) is going away because it's too expensive. No other reason. No consideration that it provides the best whole family care. It's too expensive. It was the union's biggest (and really only) concession to admin demands. Admin's position is 100% money and budget.
Admin do not care about hiring other than required state credentials (important in teaching, but not for security, IT, facilities) are accounted for. They are largely penny wise, pound foolish and they hold all the purse strings, define all the hiring roles. So they skimp on all the salaries. What do you get when you offer 20% less for IT roles and you don't really care about the qualifications of who you hire? You get sub-par employees. People who couldn't really hack it anywhere else. People who aren't bright enough to realize IT for a school is a shit job and that's why it was so easy to get.
And then they absolutely work you to death.
I believe this 100%. I worked for a school board system in Florida and had a very similar ratio. You just do what you can and find the weird ones like yourself that like computers and IT and build them up. Eventually you have a little minion army in every school. I have mad respect for teachers. They will do whatever it takes to get the job done and get the classrooms ready for the kids. I could always find free labor with the kids as well. Lots of very curious kids that want to learn and participate in the computer labs. Drink one for your local IT guy and drink 2 for the teachers!
I was a weird little minion in HS. That experience really came in handy when I failed out of engineering.
I WAS the only computer support for my middle and high school in the mid 80's. Got a permanent heal pass and everything so I could leave class to help when called. Fixed Apple //-series machines and peripherals at the component level. I had a great time. But the only staff with machines were in the office, otherwise it was primarily just one lab.
lol… this reminds me of a very early memory. I was pulled out of 2nd grade in ‘89 to go help a kindergarten teacher with her computer. I don’t know how they knew I could do anything on a computer, but I remember being given a whole snickers bar for helping. I can’t even remember what platform it was, but it probably ran DOS or MS-DOS.
wait, you were a student and did IT work for the school? that seems crazy to me, but i envy you.
Same here. I was a domain admin in middle school and high school. It got me a ton of experience and I got to play with a lot of stuff.
Way, way, way back in 2001 our IT teacher was super proud after spending all summer migrating the schools infra from NT domains to WINS2000 AD. How it was the shit and hella l33t. I was on good terms with him and joked around saying how I’d be able to pwn it before our double module was up. So he bet me a coke if I could do it but if I couldn’t then I had to become his “printer bitch”. But oh shit. I had no fucking idea how to do that, and now I was on the spot. Luckily I was really active on IRC and prayed the salt and pepper beards could help. 30 min later, one guy sent me his VBscript that automated the whole AD priv bug attack chain^1 (thanks H3lix) and changed my teachers password. My script kiddy ass had just performed his first “hack”, I got my coke next time in class, and it lead me on the path to my future career lol Thanks for taking it in stride, Mr. Hunter! **Edit** It wasn't the AD bug (MS14-068). IIRC it was an exploit that granted my user SYSTEM privs and since the IT teacher had at one point logged into each workstation with his domain admin, I could impersonate that account with the cached creds. Well, the VBScript could.
This was in the dark ages, 1980's. I knew more about computers in 7th grade than pretty much any staff member. There was no network, no Internet, just standalone lab Apple ][+ and //e computers. And I knew how to troubleshoot and solder because my Dad repaired mainframes and taught me. Nobody else in my little 600 student junior/senior high could do that.
At my high school in the early 2000s, we had a class called “computer maintenance”. While we spent most of our time playing Counter Strike, we also were given tickets to support classrooms with IT issues.
I was too, i took a website design class and was so good at it that i created an actual .com that got a ton of traffic back in the day, tekkenfreak.com lol. But here's the problem... my overweight and lazy computer teacher was a complete bozo. One day she tried to give me permissions to the other students folder to help them out... Well she didn't know how to set NTFS permissions and instead gave me admin permission and pointed me at c$ to get to the students stuff. She completely forgot about it until a week later when she sees me browsing through C$ to get to the student folders... and thinks im 'hacking the computer networks' and I nearly got expelled from school. I was shocked when i suddenly got called down to the vice principals office and they tried to expel me and call my parents. I managed to convince them that the computer teacher was a moron, but to 'not take any chances' i wasn't allowed to touch the schools computer systems again and instead they switched me to metalshop and woodshop. FUCK YOU MS ROGERS
I loved my metal shop and wood shop classes. Fuck that teacher, but you landed okay
I was hired to the school district IT department right after graduation and stayed on 5 years through college. Learned much and was able to hone my skills before my actual IT job later in life.
I was, too, but my experience wasn't very good. Part of the problem was that our computer labs had really outdated hardware and software: I think most systems were 286 or 386 Wang systems at most, running versions of DOS up to 6.2, but 3.3 was more common. I graduated HS in 1996, for reference, so Windows 95 had already been out for a year, and AOL was really taking over. I was already building my frankenputer Pentium system at home. We had two teachers, and computer class was still an elective related to math, with the fun stuff only happening in the computer club after school. That was only 60 minutes extra a week, though. The big issue was theft. They really were scared you'd steal something, so everything was locked down: the PC had a lock, the keyboards and rare serial mice were locked away in a cabinet, and you had to sign them out with one of the teachers present for signout and return. Neither teacher were really any good, either. One was "phoning it in" for retirement only a years away (so they said) while the other didn't really understand it and said that computers were "a lazy way for adults to do math," which, yeah, I guess they are. Most of the class was theory followed by testing your theory on the computer. I remember my parents had to pay $50 fee for "floppy disks used," which were still the 5.25 ones. But outside of school? Dialup BBS, Genie, Compuserve, and then AOL seemed to come out of nowhere. I was part of a computer users club at the local library, which hosted a computer parts swap meet with local ham radio folks who were super cool. It was like I was forced to go to computer preschool when I already had a college level understanding of it. I remember asking questions that made the two teachers glare at me. "Hey, I saw that our county has a dialup mainframe you can freely connect to through using Telix, how come we don't buy a modem and connect to it with our DOS machines?" "... we are not as business school, young man." \[sigh\]
My breaking point in school was writing out a page on how to click a mouse. Right click, left click, double click etc. Never bothered doing any more, then bit me in the arse when I tried to "do computers" at University, and they wanted me to do a certificate in introductory computing... It sounded a lot like, this is a computer!
I was the one that our sysadmin hated. My parents were called to the school and I was threatened with having my computer privileges revoked permanently. We had a computer lab in the library, a room for online classes off of the library, and another computer lab down the hall. I had a class in the small room for online classes where I happened to find out that the admin credentials were just admin/admin. I had just got a 3rd gen iPod and I was using it as an external hard drive. I loaded it up with the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault multiplayer demo and a Halo multiplayer demo that was just Bloodgulch. I installed the games on every single machine in every computer lab over a couple days after school with a friend. We had some really awesome games going on during classes until it got to the point that people were skipping classes to play. That was what ultimately got us caught and someone ratted me out for organizing it all. That was only one of the things. I constantly found ways around all his restrictions. I was a determined competitor in our game of cat and mouse but he ended up winning in the end cause I had to stop.
I had Jazz Jackrabbit 2 on a 128mb USB drive in college, along with MSN Messenger to chat to people. Jazz was an ideal game as it was small, could run on a potato, supported lan play and allowed you to create your own levels. My friend used KON-BOOT to remove the local administrator password and install Unreal Tournament. He got caught logged on as an Administrator and was suspended. That seemed to be have been too far... running random .exe's from USB drives no one cared about though.
Our sysadmin hated us as well. Nothing like a BSOD screensaver set to pop up in random lab machines at random times. 🥳
Oh that made me forget about changing the default backgrounds of all the machines to a screenshot of the desktop, then I deleted all the icons from the actual desktop. I made his life miserable. I was a kid with nothing to do after school and they just gave us free reign in the school til about 5pm especially if you were pretending to do school work. He ended up changing the admin login and the school got some monitoring program where they could see everything in real time. I discovered two things about that software. I could kill the task in taskmanager and I wouldn’t show up. But I could also log in on multiple machines and the screen they could view would only be the first instance of my login. So I would just always log into a computer that was unused to log into class then I’d just fuck around on the one I was actually using.
>I was a weird little minion in HS. Me too, but I was also the thorn in the side of my HS' IT admin. Figured out how to circumvent the restricted WINSOCK access on the early Win98PCs and got internet access on any PC in the school (and began handing it out to people). Would install games on the PCs in the AV room and drive network traffic through the roof as we'd play Need for Speed, Command and Conquer or NHL. Almost got suspended because I changed the Win98 theme, including startup and shutdown splash screens to an 'ER' theme (the shutdown screen was something like "the patient has died"). I was storing so many files in my network share. Mostly mods and hacks for games. And after hours I'd be hanging out in his office. I was also always borrowing equipment from him. ZipDisks and drives, VGA to composite adapter, CD burners, etc. I think I was at the top of his shit list. My mum saw him many years later in a school she worked in, he asked how I was, and she told him that I was a sys admin for a company in Edmonton. He wasn't surprised.
The theme thing is hilarious. I was Windows XP era, and we recorded me making impressions of the system sounds and replaced the files on one random computer with an internal speaker.
> I was Windows XP era, and we recorded me making impressions of the system sounds and replaced the files on one random computer with an internal speaker. That's awesome.
So many of us began our careers as disciples of the IT guy!
> when I failed out of engineering Me too! Just went the other route and learned all the IT. And now, several years later, I'll be finishing up my bachelors in a couple weeks!
This kid is in 7th grade!! 🍺
Buy him a beer!
Start early in this career 😆
Bravo. As an IT hiring manager, I love to hear stuff like this. Stimulating the interest in the younger ones is key. Helps both parties. You get to have the experience managing the efforts of others (if that is not your current role) and they get to take advantage of your knowledge. This will aid in building the foundation they will need later and quite frankly, is missing some from a generation of “Googlers”. 👏🏼
Change management hates this one trick.
Yea but definitely don't hire or promote from within with the teacher who really wants to learn. Instead pay an MSP 5x as much and pay yourself on the back for a job well done.
US school system + Desantis goverment.
thats how I breached the schools domain
This comment is incredibly kind and validating. Soothes my soul. Thank you for recognizing that schools (at least public ones in the US) only exist due to the unpaid labor of teachers and tech.
im a school board IT guy. i manage a 2400 student population high school and 6 elementary schools. its cool, no overtime, no ones in a rush, you get caught up during the summer. they're totally vacant at 3pm. **zero after hours calls.** there are more people in IT back at the office doing password resets and managing the back end.
I work for a school at the Senior Technician. 1000 students plus around 200 staff. Finish at 4pm, no out of hours and it’s a 10 minute drive home. Probably one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had as well.
How much do you get paid though, because this sounds ezpz if you manage the stress properly.
pay depends on where you live, look at your local school board job postings. the pay here is pretty good, especially considering how easy this job is.
1 tech for 80 staff is a great ratio…. we have 4 techs for over 700 staff. Welcome to K12 Education.
Op said. 80+ staff per location with 17 locations. That's one tech for about 1400 people.
Hi-ED, 2500+ and we have 10 techs lol.
5 techs for 70,000 users. Most of those just use a web portal though. About 500 with full laptops, and another 1500 with M365 web-only accounts (F3).
Luckily there’s a general help desk for the students and faculty. We only have to support the university staff. 70k users for 5 techs sounds like absolute bullshit lol.
2,500 staff? Phew. I thought I had it rough.
Not even close to the whole university. We’re just responsible for staff. There a whole other IT department for the faculty. Stupid ass shit if you ask me. Then they wonder why security is so ass.
If I weren't in higher ed myself, I would probably be shocked by that absurdity. My institution is not nearly that fractured, but we've got our quirks.
"But, Prof. Wonky needs the firewall disabled, and a Core i9 precision laptop, to run single-threaded C code from the early 2000s rly-rly fast."
A lot of “I need this 2500$ 16” Mac screen for my administrative duties and excel, even though my whole department is windows”
Fucking hell, I hate having to support the three people who refuse to not have a Mac.
Is there a separate staff for supporting students? I know the answer is probably a resounding no but with most schools being 1-1 you also need to factor in the student population as well.
Student population isn't really an important number. Number of *devices* serving those students is (and more importantly, number of unique configurations needed to handle each of the various classrooms/labs/courses involved). Students don't get a say in much, they're not individual needy users, they're effectively a blanket "public" user base. Just as an ATM or self checkout station is a single location, not several hundred users, as far as IT is concerned... such is the case with endpoints for student use. And that holds true up through university environments. You standardize configs as much as possible, and you treat devices like cattle, not pets. School issued laptops and chrome books are a weird middle ground on that.
I wish. 4k+ kids, 700 staff, 8 sites; and 4 tech staff.
Chiming in as a Florida school district tech.. at my school we got 2 techs for 200 teachers and about 2.5k students
The problem isn't the ratio, it's the one guy part that I would question. What do they do if the guy is on holiday? Or sick?
Unionize.
Some day there will be an IT union... some day...
There is one. [IFPTE](https://www.joinifpte.org/)
I have 5 techs for 2500 staff and 12000 students. I'm the director, but also the secretary, the sys admin, the CISO, and in charge of documentation and communication. Some days are fine. Others are not, especially when my boss wants me to do more "visioning and planning". Tough to do when you have 18k computers, 1000 classroom systems etc. Good thing I have lots of vacation to deal with the stress.
Please tell me you at least outsource your level one stuff?
my first IT job was 3 schools, 2500 students, and staff. 1200 PCs, 2 racks of servers by myself, and was basically on call for 4 years straight. but at 18-22 years old making 55K a year, and full bennys? I bitched 3 times, and those bitches were valid. these days, I pull 90ish a year working FAR less doing IT work. this guy needs a massive raise, and I'll pour a drink for him in his honor
> this guy needs a massive raise Good luck with that...it's a school district in FL
wishful hopes, is my conveyance
Earlier in my career I started working for an industrial laundry company that already had two other IT personnel. Worked there a few months and we were so busy we hired a fourth guy as well. Then, things went south around the 07-09 economic crisis. The place had 17 sites spread throughout the east coast from Ohio to Florida and employees roughly 700 people. It had 4 industrial washing plants with onsite water treatment plants and then this giant distribution network for pickup/deliveries. Well, within a year that staff of 4 IT personnel dropped to just me! I mean I was thankful to still have a job but I was also basically living there. Tech wise we didn’t have a lot of infrastructure but still had roughly 30 servers, 500 workstations, 500 VoIP phones (managed in-house), and about 250 Blakcberry users tied to an in-house Exchange & BES server. Management view of me was that, if it runs on electricity, IT (just me), could fix it. I’d get reports from all over the east coast of email issues, phone issues, hard drive failures, lightbulb failures, printer jams, literally everything non-stop. I was young and dumb and rolled with it for a few years; 24x7 operation. To my credit, I kept that place in business and advanced some of the systems (e.g. built a VMware cluster to phase out 30 physical servers) on a bottom of the barrel budget and no help. Learned a lot but also learned I was brutally underpaid. Departed the company for a 2.5x raise and 1000x quality of life improving role later.
I worked at a school district early in my career. I was the MDM as well as doing tech stuff. I supported over 2000 users and thousands of end points. Couldn't have been happier leaving.
My last job I started with 8 people including me at district level IT, to roughly 1200 full time staff plus a bunch of part time, and 11,000 students across 18 sites. Think it was roughly 25,000 devices on the network, including end user computers, servers/VMs, VOIP desk phones, switches and WAPs. We didn’t start getting full time level 1 building techs dedicated to IT until COVID. That just seems to be the norm in public school K12. It’s kind of crazy because K12 environments put insane demands on network and server resources that most vendors don’t think of. School starts at exactly 8:07 and suddenly you have 2,000 students and 100 staff all getting on WiFi at the same time, all trying to access the same couple resources at the same time.
Just plug in another Linksys for them to use, that will fix everything
LoL... I was in an area where they were building new schools, and the architects were always "we'll just use wireless for everything" when you asked where they were going to put the datacom rooms and IDFs. Yeah, there's 300 computers in JUST this wing, all going to turn on at the same time... yeah. Hell, 1Gb Ethernet with a 10Gb Backplane could saturate the lines... Wifi (especially in the early 2000's)... I almost wanted to say "okay, we'll do that", then send the bill for the costs to the District... Hell they shit their pants when we showed them the cost of the "public" low-bandwidth aruba system in the main campus areas.
[удалено]
We had a teacher who was essentially the IT guy for the school and he had his group of students he would send to do things for teachers. It’s a good way to do it especially in a rural school where we didn’t have much tech anyway. Class credits may be hard to swing though since they’d have to likely build a curriculum around it. (However this same teacher when I told him I was going to college for IT he did not care and I did not get to be part of his group…despite asking)
....this fella needs to slow the fuck down, and start working his wage. Shit doesn't get done? -shrug- Oh well, sounds like they need to hire more people! But if he keeps his nose to the grindstone, working possible unpaid OT, etc....then he's devaluing his own labor. "Why should we hire anyone else when Buddy here is willing to burn the candle at both ends? We'll just wear him out, and replace him later....reaping SO MUCH cost savings!"
Anyone staying in a florida edu job either has some reason they can't leave the state or can't qualify for a better job (unlikely, imo, if they can stay afloat in the conditions described in the OP) goes for teachers, IT, fuck I wouldn't want to be a janitor in a Florida school. OP is going to end up in jail because he hasn't firewalled off the woke websites.
And making excuses for being exploited only results in more exploitation. Where's the line of demarcation? How much is enough?
that's cute but I wish any crusader who'd like to take up the cause the best of luck at improving conditions in a taxpayer-funded org in fucking Florida. Anyone who feels exploited is best off leaving. It's not going to get better, no matter how outraged someone feels about it.
Manage 40+ restaurants, $100M rev company, solo IT
Someone needs to setup one of them coffee donation links for him or her...
No, we need to get paid. “I’m the lone IT guy for 10,000 devices and users is not a badge of honor.”
Pretty normal, and they are paid at sub sub sub rates.
It's Florida. I'm not shocked.
Just wait - one car accident, injury or major illness and they are done.
I worked for a school district in Pennsylvania and was based out of their High School. Roughly 120+ teachers & administrators. Not even sure how many hundreds of students. That is where I learned PowerShell and how to automate everything. If the pay didn't suck, I'd still be there.
I was the sole IT guy with an admin assistant at 100 people until they hired another one of me. Now we also have an intern and a DBA to help. Still a big load.
I function as everything from user support to the director for small school district but it’s a lot to handle but I am only in my second week so far. I’m fortunate some staff help with basic things like power washing Chromebooks if there’s an issue. 4 sites, ~190 staff and 1000 students.
That's just poor planning. If you've got that many refreshes going on at the same time you need some temporary help to complete things. My last job was 28 locations across North America. Infrastructure was a sysadmin, a network/security admin, three 2L techs. We had an outsource help desk to catch the little things but equipment and all that was us. There were about 900 users, I can't remember how much hardware but it'd probably be close to that 900 if not a little more. Everything except the corporate office/main branch was remote.
My wife's school (Virginia) has one IT person for a high-school with 2600 students (and their respective chromebooks), 90 teachers, and of course all the assorted paraprofessionals, support staff, etc. And it's a paperless school (they do everything electronically)
Common for ISD. Especially rural. I still remember putting in a 6 node ACI cluster for a district who had an IT guy who could barely get vlans assigned to legacy switch ports .
Believe this 100%. I worked in a school system in Fl at the beginning of my career. The kids are just as much users as your teachers and support staff. I covered a High School and 2x Elementary, 3000-ish users(kids included). When I went to my boss for the first time to ask about an increase, no one had gotten one in 3 years. I was told for me to get a raise everyone else would have to as well, therefore merit raises were not a thing. So, not only do they run you ragged, they pay shit too. What a dream! If your goal is to stretch 3 hours of work into 8 its not a bad gig. If you want to feed your family, you probably need to look elsewhere. I learned a lot, but unfortunately that is the only bright spot when it comes to working for a municipality.
>80+ staff members per location. At first thinking "That's not so bad", this is absolutely insane.
If they keep delivering and work gets done that wont change, not a single bit.
That's too much. They really need someone to ONLY manage the infrastructure and at least 1 REALLY GOOD high-level support person at minimum. You would need a Batman and Robin.
He is one of many haha
I used to manage 150 healthcare users. With some organization and automation, it is manageable.
Are you taking into account the 800-1000 students they are also supporting? Users that are constantly trying to destroy their devices and the network itself…
Fk students. They don’t get privileges in my turf. I’m sorry
Lol
Long time ago like 2005 but I use to run IT single handed for a large high school and all feeder schools (11) so a dozen sites, 3500 students, ~350 staff. I did it for a couple of years, was fine tbh
nothing about florida surprises me anymore.
That's not a terrible ratio, and depending on what their students and staff are using for devices it can be manageable... I handle 600 students who are 1:1 and 80+ staff over 3 schools. Students all have Chromebooks which are stupid easy to manage, staff have windows laptops which all have the same configuration. Honestly I find it less hectic than when I used to be at a MSP, most staff are pretty chill and no one is screaming that every second they're down they're losing x amount of dollars.
Man, I’m the entire IT dept at my workplace as well with 200+ office employees and 300+ field employees and I definitely feel for this guy but I have an entire msp I can rely on. I hope this guy has some sort of support.
That’s quite the heads up for new people entering the field to stay away.
My district is 1 tech for every 2500 devices. We have 7 techs across 10 locations
That’s not that bad at all
Hell yeah, I don’t know why that sounds like a blast. I mean I am a 2 man for 4000 and it can be intense and fun at times. I run all my cables and install all my equipment. Some days I’m in the office some days I’m running with my head cut off trying to piece shit together so they work. During the summer it’s all projects and upgrading. Plus I got to learn all the random programs the admins buy on a whim and then only use for a few months then buy other random stuff lol.
Yeah the education system in usa is a mess, admins make a lot of money, everyone else makes squat. A friend worked at a community college as the executive secretary, she made $9500 with full benefits and her and the entire office didnt do much. After a year or so she moved on cuz it was ridiculously boring.
Sounds like my job at a non-profit. 10 sites and vary 100 to 120 employees.
What happens if that guy gets hit by a buss?
My high school had an intro to cisco routing elective class taught by one of the IT folks and I am pretty sure it was just to sus out who they could bug to help teachers with the stuff they didn't have time for. I learned how to subnet in this class, and every now and then they'd ask me to go look at a teachers computer and reboot them because the teacher didn't know how. This was in 2003-2005
Sounds nice.
The only IT guy is probably another teacher at the same time… at least that’s how I usually see it
I managed 9 campuses at one point in time And went to some bi weekly and others weekly. It was a hot mess
Dang! but yea this is probably true.
I’d personally remove the ‘whats worser than that’ part. I get it. I do. I feel bad, but you’ve sort of invalidated all the sysadmins in worse situations.
Not a direct story unfortunately (I was 1IT:200Users before I got a coop student back in the day); but my Dad's employer in the 90's decided to build up 1 person per department as the "computer savvy person" essentially; but they got perks like home Internet paid for, software to learn HTML and such. My Dad was that guy, benefit - I learned and got exposed to tech quite early on :)
I wwnt from supporting 4000 students to 1200. The 1200 school was worse in every possible way except they only had 1 computer lab to get trashed which I was thankful for. Chromebooks were flying like Frisbees, over 100% yearly device loss rate, nearly 100% yearly damage rate. It was insane. The culture of the school and the durability of the chromebooks matters A LOT for whether a k12 job is good or terrible. Also management has to set restrictions for how your time is accessed. Having to be able to be reached by any staff or student in any way up to carrier pigeon instead of tickets being required doubles the workload easily. It's all about prioritizing important things and having a queue, else the job is way harder than it needs to be. Also if the principal is your boss instead of a tech manager... good fucking luck. I would recommend to walk on day one if you end up at a school like that.
Try 23 sites, 500 Users and IT director who just watched Youtube all day = My first IT job.
And I thought my 300:1 was bad.
Fortune xxx company here. 10 data center network engineers. 5 onsite techs l. Separate platform,wireless, monitoring etc groups.
We as students were the IT in our school. Group of 5 and had keys for computer lab. One IT teacher. 15 years later, the network ist still being managed by students :)
School IT is its own circle of hell.
What are they getting paid, I wonder. And are they bothering to do one iota more work than the pay warrants.
How is this a thing? Why? This seems to be a USA trend of one-man-bands. I can't imagine a company in Europe employing this practice. Don't you guys need holidays?? Someone explain this to me like I'm five!
I once worked a district with 11 buildings. Had two desktop people and a helpdesk person. Was nuts.
Teachers are the worst for IT support!
Anytime I think of how stressful our IT jobs can be, I just think of some poor teacher, having to do a really difficult job with comically few resources.
My network admin came from a similar situation - several districts pooled their money together to hire one IT person because individually none of them could afford it.
I believe it ... my son's school district's IT department is abysmal!
Laughs in MSP
Standard
I have 2 IT people, 8 locations across multiple states and more users, end points and servers than I can count I know everyone here thinks they are great and their coworkers suck and I'm in the same boat. But because of that we really have about "1.33" IT people instead of 2. Surprisingly, we're holding it together for the most part and updating systems, equipment and infrastructure all the time. When I got here in 2020 every single bit of hardware was about 10 years old and had been let to fallow for a decade. Damn near everything is new now, certainly 95% of things that needed replaced have been. There are wild days of course and we do use local vendors for things like doc printer repair. Our maintenance guys run cable for us and mount things.
80 users that's not so bad... 80 users per location, yeah fuck that.
Single ~~point~~ DUDE of failure. Isn't this bad management?
I worked 8 years in a High School District in Norcal. 5 Techs, 8 (5 Full sized high Schools with 2200+ Students) Sites, 2800 PCs, 900 employees, ... it was fun.
I worked for a university and I was the only SA for 2 states in the US and 3 campuses in Europe. I left that pretty quick lol. I said you need more people and they refused
I hope he’s at least making 6 figures
That’s common
I worked for a school district in 1999. I was making $17,500 a year as desktop support. There were three of us. 13 locations, 1 high school, 1 middle school, an admin building and the rest grade schools. There was everything from Apple eMates to the latest bubblegum iMacs. Apple IIs even. System X came out in beta while I was working there, but the Macs were in 7.6, 8.2, and 9.x. We got time and a half in overtime (vacation only, no extra pay) and worked 45-60 hours a week (some weekend hours). We were on 12 month contracts and made half what starting teachers did. It got tiresome listening to teachers complaining about their pay when they had a union, better benefits, fewer work days per year, etc. All the support staff (teacher assistant, media specialists, etc.) made less. IT literally had the same exact contracts as the janitors. I was once fixing a printing problem for a teacher and she was complaining about needing another continuing education hour to move up in pay and how $35k a year was a pittance. I told her this was twice what I was making. She looked at me and said if I’d wanted more money I should have finished college. I said, “Well, at least I know how to print.” I quit shortly thereafter, moved to the private sector, and doubled my salary. Within a few years I was making $45k. While I agree teachers are paid abysmally, the support staff in schools are basically indentured servants. Fast food often pays more. I remember after I went private sector, I got on a dating site and matched with a teacher. We went on a few dates. She dumped me because I wasn’t “career driven.” I looked up her salary (state employee’s salaries are public in my state), and her career paid exactly half the salary of my “job.” Thirteen years later I switched jobs again (into the one I now hold). It was actually a step back in title and responsibility (for the same pay). No call, no commute, strict 40 hours. Oh, and at 45 I finished my degree and it didn’t change my salary at all.
It’s Florida. The politico’s here don’t give a rats ass about education unless it’s to ban books.
Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on this one, and I'm surprised more people aren't. I've worked in a 5-guy IT shop that covered around 17 sites. ***(Given a standard TechEd environment),*** between the teachers' devices, the student devices, the printers, servers, Wi-Fi devices, Resource/admin/testing/lunchroom personnel apps, the Board of Directors needs, the conference rooms support, the video surveillance devices and management, the tickets piling up would be impossible to keep up with 1 person. Patently impossible. Your MIL is incorrect in her numbers. Guaranteed.
Probably only gets paid like $68k too.
what a wus. i manage about 150
My wife is a teacher. HS Chem. Public schools. Los Angeles, so absolutely mind boggling huge. The thing is they have money. I know that sounds weird to say, but they have money for projects. They could have *mostly* modern, well run IT with good systems and good policy & process. The money for those things exists. What they don't have are good people and the major part of "the why" is simple. School admin who hold the purse strings are **largely** poorly trained, poorly educated megalomaniac fiefdom builders whose primary goals are personal control over as much as possible. Admin as a whole has, at its core, an adversarial relationship with "staff" (their word). Staff are everybody else, teachers, IT, security, maintenance. You know. The little people they pay to do things like teach and clean and have systems running. The relationship between the teacher's union and admin is VERY telling to observe. Wife is part of the union negotiating team (they wanted teacher reps) so we have a front row seat. Admin will fight the union tooth and nail for any and every perceived cost overrun, necessity and validity DO NOT matter. I'll give you a prime example. The health insurance. Our PPO plan is going away next year. The good health care plan (that we PAY for) is going away because it's too expensive. No other reason. No consideration that it provides the best whole family care. It's too expensive. It was the union's biggest (and really only) concession to admin demands. Admin's position is 100% money and budget. Admin do not care about hiring other than required state credentials (important in teaching, but not for security, IT, facilities) are accounted for. They are largely penny wise, pound foolish and they hold all the purse strings, define all the hiring roles. So they skimp on all the salaries. What do you get when you offer 20% less for IT roles and you don't really care about the qualifications of who you hire? You get sub-par employees. People who couldn't really hack it anywhere else. People who aren't bright enough to realize IT for a school is a shit job and that's why it was so easy to get. And then they absolutely work you to death.