Learning and Leading - September/October 2011

Most Don’t Realize Just How
Sophisticated School Networks Are
AS I SEE “IT”

By Susan Poling

Susan Poling is the technology coordinator for Shelby County Schools in Alabama, which serves 28,000 students. She has 20

years’ experience as a district-level technology coordinator and has served as an officer for the Alabama Education Technology Association, an ISTE affiliate.

Recently I accompanied my husband to his professional association’s annual conference. Unlike ISTE, this group’s entire membership and a handful of spouses can all fit into one private dining room for the annual group dinner. Here, cocktails and seafood are consumed over a buzz of intricate industrial discussions and debate that quickly become indecipherable white noise to me. But each year, about halfway through the meal, my reverie is interrupted by one gallant engineer who is willing to sacrifice a few moments of shop talk to engage me in a brief and innocuous conversation. I have always believed that one member at each table has been assigned this task—those unlucky few who drew short straws during the cocktail hour.

Anticipating the typical sightseeing or shopping query, I had come prepared with a snippet or two that would quickly free my questioner to return to the engineering debate surrounding us. I was shocked when the man to my left turned and said, “You’re an IT director for a school system, right? You must worry a lot about kids changing their grades.” That’s when it hit me— school system IT directors must be considered the Rodney Dangerfields of the IT world.

It amazes me that some people still think the threat of students hacking the system to change grades is as gnarly as it gets for us. Even IT applicants seem shocked when they realize that their former employer’s two-server network, with 200 workstations that serve 250 users, is small fry compared to that of even a small school system. It is a mystery how people can walk through schools with hundreds of

I know that far more sophisticated networks exist, but I think few can rival those of a school district for the diversity of hardware, software, and especially users.

computers, interactive whiteboards, and even
distance-learning equipment and use the many
online resources that schools have to offer, and
still come out thinking that IT systems in school
districts are somehow “elementary.”
Is grade changing my biggest concern? No.

I am more concerned about protecting the data of thousands of students from internal and external threats. I worry when I read that hackers have been using spam and Facebook to research and then contact a school system’s accounting personnel to obtain their passwords and loot the district’s bank accounts of millions. I worry that I can’t afford the redundancy that we really need to keep us operational in the event of a tornado turning our way instead of toward my fellow school districts. And I worry about how to avoid disappointing and underserving our students’ technology needs due to a lack of funding.

I know that far more sophisticated networks exist, but I think few can rival those of a school district for the diversity of hardware, software, and especially users. Even when the public sees it, they just don’t see it the way we do. So, all you Rodneys out there, the polite thing to say is, “Yes, sometimes I worry about a student changing grades, but we get it cleared up pretty quickly.” Which, much to my husband’s relief, is exactly what I said before moving on to the cheesecake.