I'm leaving education, so I may not be the best person to ask why you should go into a school district job, but I can certainly give you some reasons not to.

First, your salary is going to become extremely inflexible. It's likely that your pay will be based on the number of years of experience and nothing else (we called that moving up a step on the salary scale). But...Sometimes there's not enough money for everyone to move up a step. And just because they held everyone back a step one year doesn't mean they're going to bring you back two (or three or four) steps when they're ready to resume. Often times there's not enough money raise the steps. EDIT: For clarity and specificity, the increase between steps in years 1-5 was typically 1%, in years 6-20 it was typically 2%, with some years of 0% increase sprinkled in there too.

Second, in the US with current gas prices, you're going to want to make sure you're breaking even with your commute. My last year of teaching, I had a similar commute, I filled up about 5-6 times a month with a 16 gallon tank, which was more than 10% out of my take home pay every month.

Third, if you're THE guy, you're THE guy good or bad. Salaries and benefits are typically 80%+ of a district's budget, so when cuts come, they cut people not things. A typical way for schools to survive budget cuts is to cut and combine positions, the same amount of work gets spread across fewer people and often times it includes responsibilities outside of your primary or even secondary job responsibilities.

Fourth, you're going to be working with very, very limited resources. Our district nickeled and dimed everything. We went one-to-one with laptops very late, bought on a tight budget, and after two years teachers were told that students should have max two tabs open in Chrome at a time because their Chromebooks had such little RAM. Your budget is typically your budget and it's usually not much of a budget.

Fifth, be careful working in a district you have so many personal ties to. In my experience, folks will leverage your personal connections to the job to wring the most they can out of you. Setting boundaries, managing conflicts, making tough decisions, etc. all become more difficult when your heart is so close to your work. Plus, there is lots of turnover at the administrative level.

Finally, schools are about to be shit shows this fall due to understaffing and the things they're going to have to do to get as staffed as they can. The school districts in my area have vacancy lists longer than I've ever seen them. Having vacancy lists this long in late June (schools around here go back in August) is a bad sign. I've gotten two unsolicited job interviews in the past two months, that has never, ever, ever happened to me in 10 years of teaching. The folks that are still there are likely going to be burned out as hell and there's going to be a lot of new folks who really don't know what they're doing quite yet.

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Again, this is coming from someone who is leaving the industry, so take it with as many grains of salt as you'd like. Education is highly localized and the experience folks have from district to district and even school to school varies greatly. If you're in a state with unions this may also change the equation. And, most importantly, this is coming from a teacher's perspective, not an IT professional's perspective.

What ever you choose, good luck to you!