As summer is upon us, not all school districts employees are looking forward to relaxing for a few months. System administrators often need to prepare during the off-student months for the new school year by making all the appropriate changes to their network, including upgrading software and changing their systems. As is often the case, hundreds of students need to be added to the roles and have accounts created for them, while hundreds more move up to different grade levels, and still hundreds more graduate out of the system.
In most cases, these access management tasks are left up to admin professionals who needs to manually make these changes to all accounts by hand. While this is extremely time consuming and often leaves the district scrambling to have everything before school starts, a manual process is rarely effective. Even when classes begin, students, teachers and staff often do not have the correct access or need changes made to their accounts.
Case in point is Waller Independent School District. Each year hundreds of students begin school at one of the Texas-based school's eight locations, and must be added to the school's network, as well as have the appropriate accounts created for them. Additionally, several hundred other students move onto different grade levels, leave the district or change campuses. This is also the case for employees working in the district. Each time an employee begins working at the district, leaves or moves to a different campus, any account management must be addressed.
"All of this required a full-time employee on staff just to handle all student and employee account management tasks,” said Rosa Ojeda, the technology director at Waller ISD. “It was an extremely time-consuming and error-prone process. We didn't have the time or funding to keep up with that."
Nearly the same struggle was faced by Pflugerville Independent School District in Texas. It hired a full-time staff member during the summer whose sole job was to manually create or move student and staff accounts to the proper group, which took up to several weeks, and often resulted in data input errors. These issues affected students and staff, who were unable to login to their accounts at the beginning of the semester.
Another district, Tangipahoa Parish School District, in Louisiana, had a more sizeable problem. The district encompasses 37 schools ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade, with more than 4,000 employees and 19,000 students. Management of the district’s user database was an overwhelming task for the small IT department tasked with the role. This situation was made even more problematic because many of the district’s schools are only two grade levels, resulting in frequent movement of students from one building to another as they progress through the grade levels. Thus, each time there was a move in the population, each student or employee needed to be placed in the appropriate security group so they were able to access the resources required of their “position.”
Because of the many associated problems district technology leaders faced, they came to the conclusion that there was a need to find a more efficient solution and began to look for a product to automate the process.
District leaders determined they needed to implement many changes to the more than 23,000 user accounts on file, which had to be completed before the beginning of the next school year, at the time just a few weeks away. An access management solution was implemented to take on the task, which also led to the HR department being added to loop, allowing for its members to lead the employee side of providing and managing access rights. Now, the district’s HR team can make all the changes to employee accounts as needed in one step, and the updates are correspondingly made in all other appropriate systems.
To handle student access, student services essentially took on the same task for the district’s students. Prior to this, the district’s technology, HR, payroll and student information departments all made their own changes, which made it difficult to communicate who was doing what.
Because all of the districts faced a similar problem, they were each able to identify and use the same solution -- eliminate manual tasks. This not only greatly improved the process of adding, changing and disabling student accounts, it also allowed them to save an immeasurable amount of time.
An automated account management solution is setup to connect with both of the district's student information systems. Anytime a change is made in the Student Information System (SIS) it is automatically reflected in all corresponding accounts and applications. This allows district staff to easily provision and de-provision all student and employee accounts from one system to others, such as Google Apps, Exchange and Office 365, and have them automatically created each night. So, system admins can easily and correctly create accounts for students and employees, and get back a more relaxing summer.
While administrative technology and IT solutions are rarely discussed in education, such solutions – automated account management solutions – have a profound effect on all parties – staff and students.
