Solving the Biggest Back-to-School Challenge

Meris Stansbury wrote this column in 2017 about IT support as the overlooked part of back-to-school preparation. A new section after Stansbury’s text looks at what districts report about technology and security today and offers a checklist for a help desk for schools before the first day.

With reliance on technology so prevalent, edtech IT needs to run smoothly., Solving the Biggest Back-to-School Challenge

Looking back at my time in school, I remember how organized my teachers were when we returned from summer break: new packs of chalk, handouts printed and ready, red pens full of ink for correcting, lesson plans broken down to the exact page of text. But this is no longer my, or your mom’s, back-to-school.

My CEO constantly refers to school technology as an add-on, and it’s become my job to constantly remind him that technology is the background of learning today. I imagine technology as the circulatory system of today’s schools: the pulsing lifeblood that makes all other higher levels of action and thought possible.

But what happens if all of a sudden that system not just breaks down, but runs inefficiently? What if IT service calls flood the department on the first day, making fixes near impossible? What if the Wi-Fi that handled x amount of devices last year isn’t accounting for the additional amount of devices with new security protocols this year? What if the new digital lesson plans for History aren’t downloading correctly?

The amount of time and energy that could potentially be lost in the first week of class is horrifyingly staggering. Which is why, when a contributor to eSchool News recently wrote “3 ways to get school services running smoothly after summer—quickly,” I thought, ‘Gosh, are other schools thinking about this?’

The Challenge of IT Drag

In the piece mentioned above, Nancy Van Elsacker Louisnord, president of TOPdesk, says that one of the biggest challenges to back-to-school is IT drag; specifically, IT being unable to handle problems as they arise throughout the district quickly.

For example, Van Elsacker Louisnord notes that many IT systems rely on heavy system customization. If that customization isn’t updated or known to most IT staff pre-back-to-school, it can create intense headaches when trying to streamline services, log requests, communicate with users and track the progress of calls.

“The service desk staff [at this school district] was answering the same problems repeatedly, for caller after caller,” she explained. And only after implementing an out-of-the-box service management solution could IT record answers to recurring problems in the knowledge base. Service desk operators are automatically alerted to possible standard solutions based on keywords. Has the operator found a standard solution? They add them to the incident.

Not only did automation and streamlining service desk management help save time, but communication became much better for the district between IT and other departments, including admin, which often relies heavily on technology for streamlining their day-to-day tasks of billing, digital communications, answering calls and requests, et cetera.

IT Support as a Back-to-School Priority

I wonder how many other schools and districts are currently in the thick of back-to-school preparations and how many are focusing on updating and helping IT to streamline their functionality. Is this a priority? I’m genuinely curious. Because honestly, as an EdTech editor, I hear a lot about preparing for back-to-school with professional development; school supplies; or implementation plans for new reform ideas; or even big technology rollouts for trending tech like VR. But service management solution prep? It’s not sexy. It doesn’t roll off the tongue. But is it happening?

Funnily enough, trying to understand the vast challenges faced by school and district IT helped me examine my company’s dependence on IT. As it turns out, our “IT department” is pretty much just one guy who helps the rest of us with everything from Blue Screens of Death to coding our customized publishing platform. If Vince Carlson, eSchool Media IT Wizard, left—or even missed a day of work—we’d be devastated.

Vince once told me that his favorite dessert is apple pie, yet no one ever makes it for him, even on his birthday. I made it for him last week.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting everyone bake pies for their IT department. I suggest that when schools and districts begin to think about back-to-school preparation, IT and the technological support they need should be a top priority.

1. EdSurge – North Carolina’s Digital Success Story
2. Ed Week – EdTech, Personalized Learning, and Virtual Schooling: Opportunities and Dangers
3. The Guardian – ‘The help never lasts’: why has Mexico’s education revolution failed?

A help desk for schools: a back-to-school readiness checklist for 2026

Meris Stansbury’s column above makes a point that has become easier to defend: when the first week of school depends on technology, the people who answer the support calls are part of instruction. A help desk for schools is the shared place where teachers, office staff and students report problems, where IT staff track them, and where repeated problems are turned into written answers. This section updates the picture with current survey data and turns Stansbury’s concerns about IT drag, Wi-Fi capacity and recurring calls into a checklist a district can use in August.

Why the load on school IT has grown

Stansbury asked what happens when the Wi-Fi that handled one number of devices last year must handle more. The tool count has risen as well. The LearnPlatform by Instructure EdTech Top 40 report, covered by eSchool News in July 2024, found that districts accessed an average of 2,739 different edtech tools during the 2023-24 school year, an increase of 8 percent over the year before. The report is built on usage data from a single vendor’s customers, so it describes the districts in that data and not every district. Each tool is a possible source of a sign-in problem, a failed update or a question to the help desk.

Security work adds to the same staff. The CoSN 2025 State of EdTech District Leadership report, as summarized on CoSN’s own page, found that most districts have no dedicated cybersecurity funding, with 61 percent paying from general funds, and that 78 percent invest in monitoring, detection and response. eSchool News adds that phishing was rated a high risk by 27 percent of respondents. Neither summary gives the number of districts that responded. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency describes K-12 schools on its K-12 cybersecurity page as holding large amounts of data with limited resources to protect it. A small IT team therefore handles both the first-day password resets and the warnings about suspicious email.

What a help desk does that an inbox does not

Stansbury, quoting the district example in the eSchool News article, describes a service desk that answered the same problems over and over for caller after caller until the answers were recorded in a knowledge base. That is the main function of a help desk. Four parts make it work:

• One place to report a problem, so requests do not arrive by hallway conversation, personal email and text message.
• A record of each request with a status, so the person who reported it can see what happened.
• A knowledge base of short answers to common problems, searchable by teachers.
• A regular review of the most frequent requests, so a recurring problem is fixed at its source or addressed in training.

A district can build this with its existing ticketing or service management system, or with a shared form and spreadsheet if the staff is very small. The tool matters less than the habit of recording answers.

A back-to-school IT checklist

The list below is a practical suggestion drawn from the problems Stansbury raises, not a finding of the studies above. A district can adapt it to its own size.

1. Count devices before the first day: student laptops or tablets, staff devices, printers and personal phones likely to join the network, and compare the count with the capacity of the wireless network in each building.
2. Test sign-in for a sample of new students and new staff in every building before school opens, since account creation is a common source of first-week calls.
3. Confirm that digital curriculum, which Stansbury mentions failing to download, loads on student devices and on the network the school will actually use.
4. Publish an approved apps list. The CoSN report found that 59 percent of districts use one, up from 42 percent in 2023, which reduces the number of unfamiliar tools the help desk must support.
5. Write down the most common calls from last August and publish the answers before the calls arrive.
6. Name a backup for each IT task that only one person knows, which is the situation Stansbury describes at the publication where the column was written.
7. Send staff a short note on how to spot a suspicious email, and tell them where to report it.

Home access is part of readiness

The CoSN report also found that only 7 percent of districts say all students have adequate bandwidth at home, and that 66 percent support off-campus broadband access, down from 74 percent in 2023. A help desk that serves families as well as staff needs to know which students rely on the school network for homework, because a home connection problem often reaches the school as a complaint about a device or an assignment.

Stansbury ended with the suggestion that IT support deserves a place at the top of the back-to-school list. A short checklist, a shared record of answers and a named backup for each critical task are inexpensive ways to act on it, and a superintendent or principal can ask about each one at the August planning meeting.

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