Operations
The school-year IT calendar for a 3,000-student district
A mid-sized system of about 3,000 students is large enough that summer is a project and small enough that the same two people will also run the help desk in September. The calendar below assumes a 1:1 or near-1:1 program, Google or Microsoft identity, an SIS, and E-Rate. If you are 800 students, keep the sequence and cut the volume. If you are 12,000, assign owners to each month.
July — build the year you want in August
- Image and enroll the new student cohort. Do not invent a new image in the last week of July.
- Confirm MDM profiles: Wi-Fi, filtering, update rings, app catalogs.
- Walk closets. Label anything you will not remember in January.
- Test restore from backup. Write the result down.
- Freeze nonessential projects two weeks before teachers return.
August — rollout without heroics
- Staff devices first, then students. Teachers cannot wait on a cart that is still in the gym.
- Publish the ticket path. Email-to-ticket is fine. A Google Form that nobody monitors is not.
- Meet principals for 20 minutes: building openers, substitute accounts, and who can approve after-hours access.
- Confirm CIPA filtering and audit logging before the first day, not after the first complaint.
September — stabilize
- Kill orphan accounts from last year’s departures.
- Watch Wi-Fi density in the rooms that always fail: cafeteria testing overflow, gym, portable classrooms.
- Start the vendor list for any new instructional app that requested roster access in week one.
- Cybersecurity Awareness Month prep: one page for staff, not a 40-slide pack.
October — security and the first budget truth
- Phishing test only if you will coach, not shame.
- Board or cabinet update: MFA coverage, backup restore time, top three risks.
- Begin next-year hardware counts. Waiting until March makes E-Rate and bidding late.
November–December — E-Rate spine
- Decide the Category 2 project for the current five-year cycle. See the C2 briefing.
- Draft the Form 470 language while school is still in session and vendors still return calls.
- Collect Form 470 bid questions in a single mailbox.
- Winter break: only emergency changes. Patch windows yes, topology experiments no.
January–February — file and forecast
- Form 471 window lives here most years. Put it on the superintendent’s calendar as well as yours.
- Refresh enrollment and NSLP/CEP data before the budget locks for the cycle year you first apply.
- Start surplus and break-fix trends. A model that dies at Christmas is a March bid, not a June surprise.
March–April — testing season
- State testing is an availability SLA. Freeze firmware on the wireless plant unless a vendor is on-site.
- Have a paper seating chart and a spare cart. The outage will be a core switch or a filter category, not “the cloud.”
- After testing, patch what you froze.
May — collect and decide
- Device collection schedule with principals. Lost-device letters go out before the last Friday.
- Decide repair vs. replace vs. insurance claim with numbers, not vibes.
- Staff offboarding: collect admin tokens, not just laptops.
June — close the books on the year
- Wipe and rack returned devices. Do not store dirty carts and call it inventory.
- Write next year’s image notes while the pain is fresh.
- One-page after-action for cabinet: tickets, outages, dollars, and the three projects you will not do.
- Take leave. A burned two-person team becomes a September outage.
A note on staffing
If this calendar looks like a fantasy, it is telling you something about capacity. Shared services through an ESC, IU, BOCES, or a K–12 MSP are not a moral failure. They are how a 1,100-student system gets a firewall that someone patches. Put that option in the same board packet as the “we need another technician” request so leadership can choose a real alternative.