Administrative Assistance III

AFTER HURRICANE KATRINA STRUCK the Gulf Coast, displaced families fled to Houston in search of dry land. That left area schools scrambling to accommodate thousands of last-minute emergency students during the already hectic start of the new school year.

Many schools floundered, but thanks to its centralized data warehouse, Katy Independent School District (ISD) was able to handle the influx efficiently, produce timely reports on its changing student population and immediately recoup costs from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We could quickly determine how many kids were enrolled, when they left, where they lived and what campuses were affected,” says Scott Wright, executive director of technology operations at Katy ISD, which has more than 47,000 students and about 5,600 staff members in 44 schools.

Had the hurricane struck a few years earlier, Katy ISD, which encompasses 181 square miles in east Texas, would most likely have been among the harder-hit districts. Its technology infrastructure had been pieced together through the years with little foresight, and the district struggled to keep pace with its fast-growing population.

Three years later, the school district has undergone a complete makeover. Its IT department is run like that of a corporation, with a centralized state-of-the-art architecture that’s upgraded and enhanced each year. The still-evolving transformation is the result of years of growing pains, but it has helped Katy’s leaders get back into the driver’s seat and steer the district’s IT operation onto the right course.

Districts nationwide are struggling with the problems Katy ISD once faced. But with a clear IT vision, strategy and policies, they, too, can rebuild their infrastructures so that they’re in control of the technology rather than the other way around, Katy’s IT architects say. “Whether you’re a district of 200 or 200,000, there has to be a strategy for technology,” says Lenny Schad, Katy ISD’s deputy superintendent of information and technology services.

The district uses a division-of-labor approach to implement its IT strategy. Curriculum specialists develop and manage instructional support for the classrooms, while the IT staff supports 18,000 desktops, 50,000 users and 150 miles of fiber-optic cable connecting the campuses.

The third leg of Katy ISD’s IT division of labor is handled by CDW Government. Instead of keeping a stockroom of spare parts in the district, CDW•G manages the procurement and software licensing and recommends new hardware. When the district needs a part, it is delivered the next day.

GROWING PAINS

The district’s technology transformation consisted of a few key steps, the first of which was hiring leaders with experience managing IT organizations and big budgets. Schad and Wright, the new department leaders, were former IT executives in the oil and gas industry. “We’re not the ‘principal of a high school turned IT administrator,’” Wright says. “We’re IT professionals.”

Schad and Wright standardized and locked down desktops and changed the way grades were kept, the way students were registered, the ID badges used in the school and even the way the cafeteria was run. They spared nothing and no one.

“That first year was … whew, it was ugly,” Schad admits. “We were turning everybody’s world upside down. The perception was that we were preventing teachers from teaching and children from learning.”

But they gave ample warning of the obstacles ahead, and their honesty and foresight earned them the support of the superintendent, Leonard Merrell, who defended their initiatives.

Schad and Wright insisted that a key factor for success would be to give IT a seat at the district leadership table, and with their peer leaders, they were able to develop a strategy for technology that was aligned with overall district goals. A major piece of that strategy was to centralize technology and data at the district level so that the IT team could manage the infrastructure.

The two men are still at it, introducing new initiatives and changing work processes. “Three years later, we have not stopped the momentum,” Schad says. “But the district is attuned to change. They textcafe join-from 9 understand that it’s just part of the way we operate.”

“I think we learned in that first year that we did way too much,” he reflects. So the second year, IT limited itself to a new student management system project and phased it in so it would affect only small pockets of users at a time.

“The system is as intrusive to a district as an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system is to a business,” Schad says. “It changes the way people have worked for 20 years.”

But, he says, now that staff members have seen the benefits of these IT projects, they trust the process. That’s important, he adds, because the real bang for the buck comes from re-engineering old work processes to be more efficient in today’s world.

“We’ve changed not just the infrastructure, but the culture within the district,” Schad says. “We’re no longer fighting the we-want-it-the-way-it-was argument. I haven’t heard that in years.”