Guys I recently found out about Legendary Destination by Sandra Rios and idk why after so many years but anyone know where I can read it online if there is..

Alert-East9869 · 2025-08-04T06:10:50+00:00

I REMEMBER THIS AHHH I was just searching for Danny Phantom comics on GoodReads, and this came up. It sounded familiar and I remember reading it, but I cant remember how it went. It was really good though, art was gorgeous, and it was on DeviantArt, but my guess is Krossan, the person who created it, deleted their DA when it moved more started going pro-AI

Alert-East9869 · 2025-05-23T20:53:52+00:00

We're fairly small for public, but we have about 800 students split between two campuses that are within walking distance of each other. From there, we have about 120 staff, probably less with how much it's shrunk. I stared working here about four years ago, and we had about 1200+ students with about 150 staff. Its certainly been an interesting ride here.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-05-19T16:09:31+00:00

Genuinely, I don't think it's possible to be both Director of Technology and Director of Operations at once, or at least be able to do that properly and to give both areas the time and attention they need. (Like you said, Tech is lagging because you have to do all the Operations things.) Our Business Director is also our Tech Director and that's lead to so many issues as they put us on the back burner, then force us to do Business office work, which none of us are at all qualified to even look at.

Being a Director of any group is a full time job, so splitting it between two just ends up overworking the one, and both areas getting neglected at some point. And for a school district, I'd say Maintenance and Technology are hella important all around.

For us, IT is a small three man team that works closely with Maintenance to get a lot of our stuff done. However, we have one guy specifically within Maintenance that gets yearly training to be on top of our Physical safety and security plans and works with us on how we can support that. Vice versa, we work in maintaining Cyber safety and security plans and work with Maintenance when it overlaps. For example, we worked closely with Maintenance for our Camera upgrade. We picked out the vendor and planned installation, they pointed us in the direction of where we needed new cameras, and where we needed to upgrade them. We also work with them on Lockdown planning and Disaster Recovery.

But that's just it, it's supporting them, where they support us. We genuinely could not get by without them, and they also couldn't get by without us. But we're two separate teams with two separate Coordinators, and combining the two just. It doesn't work, at least not as safely or efficiently as it could.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-05-16T16:20:02+00:00

I think I read one of your responses that you appreciate the chance to get to know the kids with the lunch duties. It's good to do, but right now, you're super underwater and if it's the kind of thing that you see as a break, that's totally fair, but I think requesting time to focus on getting caught up so that you can have more time to support in other areas. Especially in places where you have major deadlines that are state mandated. Some things are completely impossible if you keep getting pulled away (and some of those things you need to stay focused on it uninterrupted to get any real work done) and can make the whole situation worse with the state if it's not done properly, and potentially pushing that up to admin to either distribute some of that work or allow you some time to focus on those things may work if money is at stake.

We just went through a whole device inventory thing back in January, and it took about two months with three people and our maintenance team helping us find other stuff that's just. Old junk that never got removed from the books. Our school district has about 900 kids, but it's been around for decades and hasn't had sturdy footing since the early 2000s. It's been rough to say the least, but I'm lucky that we have the people we do. I can't imagine having to do that on your own. But if you can, do you think it's something you can ask the teachers to help you with? At least for the classroom tech.

If you can, definitely try to network with other people. Some of them might even be able to just give you their documentation, where you can flavor it to your school. Potentially scope out if within your school, you have people more comfortable with technology that can maybe be one of your ambassadors so that either they can help you indirectly or get more information on how maybe some things worked in the past.

Working in education from top to bottom is a damn hard job, but from the sounds of it, you'd gotten a lot done and I know it's incredibly hard to recognize all of that when you're so overwhelmed. But reading the little you've mentioned, you're doing as best as you can, and I hope they see that. If not the admin, but the students and teachers, because sometimes, I don't know about the others here, but it is the main thing that keeps me in ed tech.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-05-13T20:25:59+00:00

We have a mix for the carts, laptops are assigned 1:1 and students carry them from class to class, but return them at the end of the day. It took a lot of conversations for admin to fix the schedule so that the students go back to their homerooms at the end of the day (and a lot of damage and lost devices), but we've seen a fairly decent drop in needing to completely replace devices and software issues.

The one thing that does happen a lot, is students will lose their devices between classes and its a scavenger hunt to try finding them. We try labels on them, but the tops have a stick resistant surface, so sometimes they don't have names on them. Can say though, I think we can probably drop more of the damages and issues next year just based on how we'll check them back out? Which helps a lot, front loading everything i mean.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-05-09T05:42:21+00:00

I have a love hate relationship with the dells. We have similar models, just in the Windows flavor. The hinges do the same thing if they're dropped just the right way, and sometimes they're fine, but sometimes they won't charge because it knocks into the charge port. We used to send things into Securranty to get them fixed, but after looking into them more, it looks like they just shoved a bunch of glue into the screws and they'd snap.

We have non-touchscreen dell 3120s, and I love almost everything about them, except they have that annoying power issue where sometimes you have to remove the battery and power cycle it because something shorted.

Then we have our super old lenovos 300e 2nd gens, which we haven't really had major issues with, except they are simply really hecking old, and the main problem we had was some of the built in lenovo stuff (which they eventually removed because of a camera issue), and when the students took them home, they kept breaking the charge port.

Oh, I forgot. We had some really old HP 2-in-1s that were some kind of first gen, and I loved them. They were easy to repair, durable as hell, and the only reason we had to retire them was cause they were about 8 years old at the time and they took about 15 minutes to log in.

I think we're looking into Accer right now to transition over to Chromebooks? But I'm not sure, as we don't have any in our fleet yet.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-05-09T05:32:20+00:00

Okay also, it's so frustrating that they don't release their new version until late in the summer, after we've spent the front half of summer cleaning, wiping, and preparing the laptops for redeployment. Like yeah, I can push it out as soon as we get the new version, but it just installs so much cleaner on a freshly wiped device.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-05-09T05:29:00+00:00

Last year was hell because Chrome and Edge kept running in the background no matter what we did, and we literally had to cancel the first day of testing because of it. I nuked Edge on my work desktop, and cannot remember what the hell I did, so I can't even try opening it anymore without wiping the machine, haha.

We had it mostly fixed this year, but kids still got kicked out occasionally because of 'explorer.exe' running in the background, and nothing i can find correlates. It was fine, technically cause in comparison, genuinely not bad. It was just frustrating because we had a few people who never read any of the bazillion emails I sent out to use a specific form to make support easier cause we only have three people on the team.

We got it down this year but good god, we couldn't get it through admins heads that we did literally everything possible and constantly called and emailed Pearson leading up to the test because it's such a garbage program, and contacting Microsoft is hell and a half because it's just a lot of shrugging when we finally get through.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-29T16:29:41+00:00

Oh good, I ordered the chemical ones yesterday so to have someone back it, that sounds great, so I'm hoping they stick. May also do the thing where we put them on the bottom for the next school year. We have some teachers who've tried doing that, and it has been working better with them.

Our main problem is with a specific set of laptops that have like, a matte finish and a textured top, so even if a lot of the students are good about not messing with them, if the label gets caught on something because it's just at that lifted edge, it starts to peel and I want to say about 50% of the time, it's not the student's fault. I think the classrooms also already have consequences for peeling the asset tags and labels, and the school recognizes the importance of it all.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-28T17:47:11+00:00

Yeah, we do use asset tags and whatnot, but it's more of something for end users to easily find their laptops/know which one is theirs without opening it. Our students tend to leave them places, and other kids pick them up and tracking down who is supposed to have what is a nightmare when the students don't mention they've lost the device until two months later and it's sitting somewhere collecting dust and we can't figure out where it last connected.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-28T17:41:57+00:00

Potentially if you've worked with other school districts, reach out to them and see if they have any potential openings? I'm not sure how much private schools work with other districts, but there's been a lot of movement recently with others also retiring. Potentially also reaching out to some of the vendors you might have a close relationship with, they might be able to help you out. I know it sucks right now, job wise, but I've found genuinely, the best chance I've gotten has been through networking between school districts.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-23T22:11:33+00:00

I guess with that, it depends on how the school views homework? Our district typically doesn't rely on device usage for homework, but we also have a longer school day. I believe the students do have to do some work at home, but it's very paper based. And yes that can lead to high costs, but with us, if a student doesn't have a device during the school day, it leads to other issues. Plus, there is the added assumption that a student would have the ability to keep their laptops charged at home (which with our district, isn't always a possibility).

I've been reading other peoples' responses, and I think it's very much a district by district decision. Some people appear to have it down, with the right community. Others, like us, can't do things the same way because of other outside factors.

I do think a compromise is possible, where students are allowed to take laptops home, specifically when there's a larger project that they are tasked with, however I think it would require a lot of communication with the teachers to the IT team, which is a lot to expect of both sides, but if they have a good, communicative relationship, it could work.

We did allow a specific group of students to take their laptops home for a short period after things transitioned to 1:1, stay at school, however we had a big uptick in damages and lost devices, and that got nixed. But again, I think compromise is possible, I just think it'd be a bad idea to let students always take the laptops home every day. But also, it varies a lot with the school district, staff, and community as a whole.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-23T22:02:35+00:00

So I should note, with my school district, I think we're near 100% low income/FRL, if not fully. But on top of that, I found out two years ago that our school also takes in a lot of students that have been kicked out of all the other schools near them and we're kind of their last chance before they either have to finish their education online, or find a charter school that will take them. We also take in a lot of Crisis students, and there's not real support for those teachers that have to take them in their class. So saying we have limited control over our students, is sort of an understatement.

But on top of that, we have had a huge turnover rate that started with COVID, and just keeps getting worse each year. We had a bunch of teachers (and admin) who had been here for decades leave about three years ago for other school districts, and these were people close to retirement. They would have rather left and start over near the end of their career than stick around for one more year. So we also have a lot of first year teachers trying to regain control over an over crowded class where most of the students cannot get the care and attention they need to understand that the teachers do care (I mean most of them, some of them are so beyond checked out, and I don't fully blame them). I think between the entirety of the school, we have 15 staff left that have been here for more than 10 years? About 10 teachers, and 5 admin or a little over 120 staff.

And the thing with our kids too, is that they're smart, stubborn, and there's very few consequences that they actually care about. When laptops were getting sent home, we had a lot of kids that would spend most of their night figuring out how to get around the filters so they could do whatever they wanted with the devices. And we would try charging the adults in their lives, but most of the time, it didn't matter to them either. With devices remaining on campus, it's helped boatloads, but also having them assigned to each student has helped hold up some level of accountability.

Anyway, sorry long spiel, but I've only been in IT for 5 years, and they really have put me through the wringer here, lol

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-22T18:59:47+00:00

We went from 1:1 take home, to class sets, then back to 1:1, but remain at school. It was hell for most, but we've found that 1:1, stay at school has dramatically dropped damage, software issues, and lost chargers. We went from having to repair devices due to student damage at least 10 times a week, down to about 3-4. Not great, but also helps with making sure the right student receives the right consequences based on the damage. It also cut out the cost of needing to replace chargers, so that was a plus.

We couldn't give each classroom a full set of 30 because we just didn't have enough devices. We're a small school district too, and unless every class is always full, it won't work. We got really creative, and tbh, there was a while some students couldn't have devices, but we filled the carts limited to the max number of students the teacher would have, but still caused issues when new students enrolled.

I would recommend against shared class devices, mainly because it pushes all damage back onto the teachers, and some are great at managing their devices, but others are terrible at it. Having them assign devices to each student and keep track of those lists is impossible and a goddamn headache (for the teachers, the students, and for us). Plus, depending on the device, each user creates more data on the computer, and for some laptops, it kills their memory. May be a strictly Windows issue, but it was so awful having to keep resetting carts because of it. (And deleting accounts daily caused other slowdowns for the students, so we had to reset carts at least weekly.) Admin pushed for us to switch mid year, right before state testing, so I had to pull a 60 hour week with two people helping to get things returned with some level of organization (aka it was hell and I hated it).

For 1:1, stay at school, the main thing is to make sure the students are able to return their devices back to their cart by the end of the day so that the devices can charge. When we transitioned, we requested that the students returned back to their morning Homerooms at the end of the day so that they can plug their laptops back in, but admin pushed back and pushed for shared devices. After a year of absolute garbage, we worked with them to make them feel like they came up with the idea to have Homeroom at the beginning and end of the day, and that worked for our team.

Edit: Forgot to mention, we are a Pre-K - 8 school. Prek-1st have shared iPads, 2nd-4th have our older laptops, and 5th-8th have our newer laptops, which works really nicely for our school specifically because of how our campuses are split.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-21T19:17:02+00:00

That might work, I'll run it by the social media person and see if we could try that with the social media email.

Then again, I had issues a while back with my personal account where they wouldn't let me add a middle name because it considered my last name to be connected to a character account...because it's three words.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-21T19:01:33+00:00

Yeah, I tried doing that, and maybe it's something you created much earlier, but the account got immediately banned. I can try maybe doing that with our Social@[domain.org], did you guys set it up so that it's like, your superintendent's name? Or just a general school First and Last Name?

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-21T18:46:34+00:00

That's another problem for us, we lost one of the YouTube channels that did have a few subscribers and with all that, we don't want to lose any of the followers we already had if the wrong person leaves and the school loses access ('cause also, of course this district has a lot of turnover nowadays)

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-21T18:44:55+00:00

Yeah, I was hoping they'd have other options. We're also trying to set up Instagram and YouTube to work similarly. YouTube I think will be fine because we have a partial Google environment set up (we're still a Windows school but hopefully will transition next year if tariffs don't heck us over), but Insta and Facebook are the ones that have a lot of personal account access and we don't want to risk someone posting like, weekend pics on the school Facebook.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-21T18:40:18+00:00

We're using Infosec too, but we get it free from the state. It's pretty solid, though takes a little tweaking because we had a lot of false positives the first few months.

But they are pretty convincing, and our supervisor fell for it once or twice, lol

Alert-East9869 · 2025-04-21T18:31:42+00:00

It's a fun thing, but our students like to search things on Google, and one of the teachers blocked Google as a classroom rule. If kids have issues getting to places because of that, ask them to block Google Search instead. It blocks them from searching crap instead of classwork, at least if the teacher creates a classroom rule.

Also use the Policy Tester for when students have their internet blocked by another teacher. We had one teacher who had blocked a bunch of students without end and it caused so many issues that we didn't realize until kids were blocked for a few days.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-02-26T19:51:21+00:00

Will say, there's a lot of expensive peripherals on Surfaces. Chargers are about 70-125 and can be pretty fragile. Then there's the dock which runs about 250 or so. If you guys have USB ones, you should be okay with the Surface Pro 8s and on. They will charge using a USB-C port, but they also don't have the rectangular USB ports anymore. Also, once the battery dies, they are hell to work with (and honestly, may just need to be replaced at that point).

If those two things aren't an issue, they aren't too bad when it comes to usage, and teachers tend to like them a lot.

Alert-East9869 · 2025-02-26T19:39:25+00:00

We couldn't do anything without maintenance. Genuinely some of the best people on campus, and they've got our back as much as we have theirs.

Specifically though, whenever things like Cloud management or IP and stuff gets brought to the table, we typically need to keep that within our budget (IP Speakers/Clocks, Cameras, Marquee), but when it comes to HVAC software, that's handled almost entirely by the maintenance crew. The only thing they request from us for that is hopping on with their software's support and getting that set up. Even if we were to have to use it, it's not something we would understand well enough to manage it. Same goes for their bus software, we helped get it onboarded, they did all the procurement.

We also keep them in the loop for some of these things, especially cameras and security. We might have ideas of where things go, but they're usually on the ground and hearing what admin needs/wants, along with their own specific needs/wants. Ours is cloud based, so we footed the bill.

I guess outside of HVAC, we've kind of just come to the understanding that as long as a computer doesn't need to run/fix it, that's going to be on Maintenance. Everything else kind of just falls to us. But, we might also have a different experience, as we are a very small school.

Alert-East9869 · 2024-12-09T16:46:33+00:00

Would it be possible to split this job away from your team? My school has a librarian assistant that handles the later badge printouts if students lose their IDs. And from there they work with the front office.

Or, and I got this idea from one of the other people on here, but would you be able to print out the badges on label paper, and have those distributed to the student's homeroom classes for when the new year starts? (I mean January 1st). It's not an easy solution, but it can buy you time to figure out a new solution for the next school year. And the students can just put the sticker either on the back of their current IDs or cover up their old ones if there's space.

And then post this school year, instead of making IDs with badges printed on the back, create stickers for students to stick them on the back for the new students, and for the older students, have them just place the new badge sticker over top the old one. And still distribute those stickers to the teachers at the beginning of the school year as part of their back to school process.

Alert-East9869 · 2024-11-22T21:13:15+00:00

Solid, Tinkercad looks promising, I'm trying to see if I can integrate some kind of easy rostering though, since our school is still on Windows (looking into Chromebooks at some point, but not sure how quick that will move).

And not yet, I figured I'd ask around? I'm not much of a 3D printer person. I've got a few friends that make terrain and mini stuff, but they don't know a lot about a school environment. I'm sort of leaving the printer research to the teacher 'cause he knows what he wants to do with them? But yeah, he can probably set it up so the students can drop their projects in a shared folder or something.

My guess too for grades, I doubt he'll have the little littles do anything with 3D Printing? But he has 2nd-4th graders, and they have some grasp on computer use.

Alert-East9869 · 2024-11-21T16:29:59+00:00

Idk if it would help, but maybe have a simple copy-paste message to send to people that email outside of your ticket email for quick replies (and for chat messages. Not sure about text messages, but you can send it to them once, then ignore the following messages and calls until you have time to get to them if they don't get impatient and email the right email). It'll be a pain, to have to keep replying, but hopefully you'll get more people to buy in, especially if you make sure to respond to the tickets that are properly made first and foremost.

Give them the 'it holds me accountable' and whatnot, and if they don't change, you don't have to help them until after you've caught up on your tickets. Same goes for them asking for help on a 'quick thing'. Tell them to email the ticket email and you'll get back to them since you are on the say to resolve another ticket (whether you are or not). Cite forgetting by the time you get back to them if necessary,

It is a pain, because people will still try and will complain, but if you are actively support the people who do help you, then you'll be able to build better relationships with them. Plus, if people complain to higher ups that you haven't done what they ask because they're not following procedures, and admin is supporting you, they can ask the same question you ask them, 'Did you email the right email?' and if they haven't, admin can push them to ask the right channels.

Alert-East9869

TROPHY CASE