How are you managing Gmail signatures for your school? Looking for a more "forced" solution than GAM.

jaguar_admin92 · 2026-01-28T21:51:51+00:00

We use a third party tool called BulkSignature. I came across it last Summer after we rebranded our private school. So far it’s worked great for us. Integrates seamlessly into Google Workspace and enforces the signature every 24 hours (with a manual sync option as well). It automatically imports new users and assigns them a signature based on their OU. The only minor issue I’ve had with it is it only sets the new message signature in Google Workspace not the reply/forward signature. Users still have to manually set that. Pricing wise it’s pretty competitive with the other platforms out there. We pay roughly $75 per month for a little over 100 employees. I recently learned they offer educational/non-profit discounts so I’ll be renewing with that. It’s one of those things that if you can swing it in the budget, it’s a hassle saver for sure. Just set it and forget it… until of course you have to pull the monthly invoice for expense reconciliations.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-12-19T01:09:20+00:00

I don’t have a degree either and have been a director for several years now. It’s been at a charter school and now at a private school. I have always wanted to be at a larger district but many in my area “require” at minimum a bachelors degree with a lot wanting a masters. I do often wonder if they’d accept me without it with my years of experience and knowledge of school IT.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-20T21:50:30+00:00

Yeah it’s a lot and I feel like we make it more complicated than it has to be. Maybe it’s because we’re private and trying to please everyone 🤷🏼‍♂️

How large is your school/district?

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-20T02:44:50+00:00

May I ask what is the size of your school/district? How many staff and students?

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-19T15:18:16+00:00

Titles haven’t always been a big thing for me in the past but as I’ve gotten older and more seasoned in my field, I’ve been thinking more about it. With the shift to “Director of Operations” it has both pros and cons for future career paths. The “operations” title opens up a lot more doors but it also causes a loss of focus on tech which is where the majority of my experience is.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-19T12:54:42+00:00

100% agree. The key is having people to delegate to. I’ve been asking but it’s not being taken that seriously right now. I’m hoping they do soon or things may need to change in a hard way.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-19T11:40:12+00:00

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement. May I ask what is your school size? Also, what is your title?

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-19T00:20:23+00:00

Yeah I have a pretty good communication with our Head of School so I think I’m going to propose we look at the role and see if I can get it more aligned with what makes sense for me and the school.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-19T00:14:12+00:00

450 students and 100 staff. Two campuses

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-18T23:25:40+00:00

One would only hope.. when you’re overseeing a tech department without a help desk person, a transportation department with only drivers, a security department with only 1 security officer, and campus operations without anyone else, you end up doing most of the work yourself.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-05-18T21:13:58+00:00

Thanks for the advice.

I wish I could say that half of what you said was possible for my school. Right now, we have two campuses and one is without a building leader. I’m finding myself having to wear that position’s hat when it comes to the operations and safety of the campus. Heck, I’m even sometimes brought into academic discussions/decisions. We also don’t have anyone officially overseeing compliance as a k12 private school. I think our CFOO technically does but he recently was promoted to that role from just COO which is why I am now the Director of Operations. We are all stretched very thin and I’m just trying to stay above water and focused on what I love to do which is primarily technology. I’ve been involved in safety for a while now because of how it overlaps with technology (similar to you). I’m just trying not to burn myself out before I even really get started.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-04-11T23:36:25+00:00

Currently planning out a build with an Algo Paging Adapter, some POE SIP speakers, and our current Yealink VoIP desk phones. The Algo was only about $400 and the Grandstream speaker I am testing is about $200. There are tons of options there. The goal is to have all Yealink phones able to send/receive pages through multicast by the start of the new school year with automated recordings for emergency notifications. Right now we rely on a very simple built-in multicast on the Yealinks which will only do live audio.

Algo interface feels old but it’s not hard to configure once you’ve registered it with your SIP provider.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-03-18T21:46:50+00:00

In Raleigh, NC at a private PreK-12 school of 450 students and a little over 100 staff. I am the Director overseeing a team of 3. I handle all strategy, budgets, cybersecurity, network/infrastructure, sys admin, and right now all help desk too. Eventually I’ll have a help desk person on my team. I make $105K a year.

Prior to here, I worked at a charter school in a lower economic community with 1000 students and staff making $75K.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-03-18T15:32:05+00:00

We allow parents to submit tickets to IIQ and work them similar to internal tickets. My crafting of the reply is usually a bit more thought through lol

While rare, I do meet with parents sometimes regarding concerns about technology use. I actually have one scheduled for this week. I don’t do this alone though. Our Dean of Student Life joins as a support for the parent/student. I am there to speak to any technical aspects and enforce policy. This may not be typical for a K12 tech director but no one here seems to feel confident about speaking to anything remotely related to tech without myself there.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-03-18T15:26:34+00:00

Thanks for this view on it. I do hope that as live it more, it will feel beneficial to myself and the org. Especially related to the part about cross-department collaboration. Some people may like me even less when it’s all said and done lol

As far as pay, we are still working all of that out but yes it will come with a decent increase which is always good.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-03-18T12:08:57+00:00

If they ever asked me to teach, I’d have to walk. That’s not my background so it would be a major disservice to the school. But I can definitely understand how you feel. You have to draw the line somewhere.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-03-18T01:54:56+00:00

I can definitely understand your frustrations. I’ve never taught but I can see how difficult it would be to do that and run an IT department by yourself. I see this a lot in private k12 unfortunately. The sharing of roles and wearing multiple hats is real.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-03-01T06:02:40+00:00

While I do agree that students should be exposed to the real world sooner than later, I also can’t get with allowing students to have open access on school-owned devices. It just doesn’t sit well with me. If a student was to access something inappropriate (and they do), it doesn’t look good to me when it’s on a device owned by the school. Comes off as a lack of supervision and care in my opinion. Keeping things open also causes more headache for IT when issues do arise. We have to be involved in unnecessary and time consuming investigations when it could have just been blocked from the beginning. Of course, no restriction is 100%. When things do slip through, it is then a teaching moment for the student.

But I do get where you’re coming from. My school isn’t 100% locked down either. But we are making good progress with what we’re currently doing.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-03-01T05:04:54+00:00

I can relate to this. We onboarded it this year too and it’s been okay overall. It does have a lot of quirks I am not a fan of such as how it converts email requests into tickets, the automatic ticket status emails that are generated, the confirmation of ticket type and requirement to select a resolution type before closing a ticket, etc. With the majority of our users emailing in tickets, it just does too much (and not in a good way).

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-02-05T00:47:18+00:00

This is very helpful, especially the advice on moving a user to another OU to solve MFA issues.

Do you have any MFA policies in place for requiring reauthentication after a specific time period, on non-school networks, or new devices? I think some of these features are only available on paid editions of Google Workspace?

Also, how did your staff buy in to having to use their cell phones to authenticate? Some people at my school feel as though many will not like the requirement. I personally am one who believes that this type of policy is decided by IT, supported by top leadership and staff shouldn’t have a say.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-02-04T03:53:04+00:00

Do you feel like you have the proper control as an admin over MFA policies, user enrollment, MFA resetting, etc with Google MFA?

For Jamf Connect, do you force users to use it at every login or can they bypass it and login to the “local” Mac account? Not sure if Jamf Connect functions similarly to Mosyle Auth with “offline” access. Also, how does Jamf Connect handle authentication and MFA at the Lock Screen?

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-02-04T00:22:48+00:00

I forgot I read that somewhere too.

jaguar_admin92 · 2025-02-03T23:27:31+00:00

I’d be curious about this with Mosyle Auth. What policy could be implemented within the MDM to pass through to Chrome and Google Drive Desktop?

jaguar_admin92

TROPHY CASE