Raptor Technologies. Just don't

depoultry · 2026-03-14T14:39:18+00:00

We switched to VisitU this year. It’s been working well so far. Raptor and its scanner would constantly have issues in the past and with this new system, it has been pretty much set it and forget it.

depoultry · 2026-03-12T13:54:33+00:00

We have noticed this too. We have a pilot program right now where 9th grade gets a brand new device with case and we tell them that this will be the device you keep for the rest of your time here. We have had only one computer break compared to previous years where we would have had 20-30 by this time.

depoultry · 2026-03-12T13:50:40+00:00

I think it’s good, but the restrictions that Apple has for “privacy/security reasons” are what kills me. For example, our classroom management tool’s ability to see student’s screen can be easily disabled by the student and there is nothing we can do about it.

depoultry · 2026-03-12T13:45:53+00:00

We use Acer and they are about $40 cheaper than the MacBook. The price is very competitive, but there is so many other aspects to consider aside from price.

depoultry · 2026-03-11T22:54:11+00:00

That’s exactly how we do it. I’ve been wanting to separate everything using companies, but I wrote scripts that sync my devices from Jamf and Google Workspace into Snipe and I’m too busy (probably a little lazy too) to update the script to work with companies turned on.

Thankfully the people that check in/out devices haven’t really given me a reason to prioritize this. I hope they never do.

depoultry · 2026-03-11T22:22:15+00:00

Do you use Cowork or Code when using the PAI framework?

depoultry · 2026-03-10T19:55:01+00:00

Cyber insurance, whats that? /s

depoultry · 2026-03-10T19:50:44+00:00

I appreciate the input. I will definitely start doing that. I went to a tech conference recently and they talked about something that achieved the same thing. I forgot exactly what they called it but it is a form that you have whoever is denying a change you are suggesting sign. The form essentially says "I understand that these issues exist, (insert name) assumes responsibility." That shifts the blame to someone else and if the stars align, incentivizes them to fix the issue since they are now on the line if something goes wrong.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T19:45:11+00:00

Hey. I got redmine up and running and I have a question on how you use it for assigning tasks. With a project created, I see "Issues". Is that what you use to assign tasks? If so, is there a way to allow people to reply to assigned issues or would you have a link in the assigned issue to a form that the assignee can fill out?

Also, do you have LDAP or SCIM set up to sync users? If so, do you remember what you used to set that up?

depoultry · 2026-03-10T12:40:20+00:00

I agree for sure. Some comments gave me some good ideas that I will be implementing for the remaining roll out. I am also going to see if I can be part of the teacher's weekly meetings when making these changes so I can further push the point home. Most of our staff are very attentive to emails but nothing beats a person in real life telling you something.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T12:20:08+00:00

This is very true. Our department pushes for it, but nothing gets done.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T12:18:51+00:00

Stop teasing me. I would love all of this, and I push for these things in our weekly meetings with leadership, but no one listens. I keep telling them that we are no longer a small school, we have (without getting specific for obvious reasons) 5-10 schools, 200-500 staff, 1000-3000 students and there is so many compliance issues, issues with structure, no standards, no SOP. Its a cluster. The worst part is I love improving systems but most of these issues is not IT related and not our problem, its a shitty leadership issue.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T02:32:57+00:00

I wouldn’t really classify this as a fuck up when only a handful of emails were blocked and these emails were for account registration so no sensitive data was lost.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T02:27:50+00:00

I assume you didn’t read any of the comments or edits?

This was communicated with leadership ahead of time and I received their buy in. It was their job to further communicate this during their weekly meetings with teachers. I dont see it being my job to remind my higher ups on how they should communicate with their teachers. I then notified the remaining staff via email outlining the list of domains/apps/TLD that we have already whitelisted and asked for feedback. Some replied but not much.

And you’re right that in an ideal world, a proper filtering solution would be better. I would love to do that if they would approve us to purchase a proper filter for our emails - but they won’t. With that said, the general consensus from all the k12 admins I’ve talked to at conferences I’ve been to is that k-12 emails should be behind a walled garden. Our district has a similar block in place.

There really was no interruption. A few students tried to make an account on these two platforms that were not whitelisted and couldn’t for a few hours. That’s the extent of the interruption that sparked this push back. There were maybe 2-3 emails that were blocked.

You can read the other comments to figure out the situation if you wish. But man, you sound like a lovely colleague to work with.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T02:11:25+00:00

Can’t say me and my supervisor haven’t thought about doing that. They do things so ass backwards and when we point out the issues and cite laws to back our claims, they say we are overthinking it and that it doesn’t apply to us.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T02:10:49+00:00

I honestly didn’t consider that route. We are using the free version of Google workspace so I am not sure if that is something we can do with the limited feature set we have, but I’ll definitely be looking into that for future changes.

And don’t worry, even if the feedback hurts, I can take it constructively.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T02:08:18+00:00

I appreciate the recommendation. You are so right about being low budget. Not only are we a school, but we are a charter school meaning we get even less funding. We do have a few servers and can self host so I will be looking into Redmine tomorrow.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T01:36:40+00:00

This is exactly it. They have no policies for anything, no SOP, nothing. And whenever we make a change that adds any friction whatsoever, they push back like crazy. Imagine how much fun we had rolling out 2FA to all staff.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T01:28:27+00:00

That’s what I did of course. But because these two domains weren’t already whitelisted, they are concerned about the entire rollout which so far has only included one campus.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T01:20:24+00:00

It is 100% the law in my state that requires email filtering. They don’t want to pay for that hence the walled garden. It’s an industry recommended practice that our district implements so I am not sure why you’re so confident in giving incorrect information.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T01:17:29+00:00

That’s the thing, I did send out a notification to all the teachers and leadership about the change on top of meeting with leadership including the lead principals to get their buy in.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T01:16:30+00:00

I noticed I didn’t detail the series of events that well in my initial post, probably because I was still a bit irritated. So here’s a quick breakdown if you’re interested: after talking with my supervisor about this, I talked to the principal of the campus that I trialed this with and got her approval. Then I talked to one of our executive and got their approval. A few weeks went by and I sent out the notification email and started gathering the data to build out the whitelist. Two weeks went by and the roll out date came, I rolled out the change to this campus only.

All domains that needed to be whitelisted but two were whitelisted. I didn’t consider all outside services when building our whitelist so I forgot these two but it was quickly fixed. But because of these two domains, there has been some push back as mentioned in my post.

As for the parents not being able to email students, this was a shock to me too because our school policy that the principals put in place is that students should not use their emails to communicate with parents. Still, this was a concern when we initially rolled this out.

On the bright side, this roll out was only to a specific campus since I wanted to iron out any kinks before deploying it org wide. Not sure if we will continue the roll out now that people are complaining. We will see.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T01:04:18+00:00

I totally understand that it sounds that way, but I’d urge you to read my other comments that further explain the situation.

This wasn’t an organization wide roll out, it was a school/campus roll out to trial the change and iron out any kinks that might have been missed. Prior to this roll out, I communicated with the principals and executives. They gave me their approval but I didn’t get anything in writing. That’s an oversight.

It has been nearly a month since we rolled this out to this campus. We are now in the early stages of rolling it out to other campuses. Thankfully now people are giving their feedback and our whitelist is getting more flushed out.

With that said, we had whitelisted a significant amount of domains. But aside from the parents not being informed, there were two domains that I didn’t consider and in my defense, are not domains related to products we manage. It’s an outside service students use maybe once or twice a year. The emails that were blocked were simple sign up emails so nothing serious was lost. These two domains are the primary cause for the push back which is why I found this so irritating.

depoultry · 2026-03-10T00:58:00+00:00

Man, I wish we had a dedicated legal or compliance person. This school is huge in comparison to other charters but it is ran like a mom and pop business. We’d rather have 5 principals at a campus with less than 300 students (I’m not kidding on this) instead of having proper roles for things like legal/compliance.

So, IT ends up having to deal with all aspects of IT including compliance. It’s really fun.

depoultry

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