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.