A practitioner's view of why district operations keep breaking down
By Marc Elliott, CIO, Olympia School District
When people talk about the operational challenges facing school districts, the conversation usually lands on staffing and budgets. Not enough people, not enough money, too many devices to manage. That is all true. But it is not quite the right diagnosis.
The districts I know, including my own, are not missing data. We have data everywhere. What we are missing is any practical way to use it without first spending significant time and effort pulling it together by hand. What we are running on, whether we call it that or not, is manual coordination: people manually connecting information across systems that were never designed to share it, manually assembling answers that should already exist, manually holding together an operational picture that has no single home.
How the fragmentation happened
Just before and during the pandemic, school districts were deploying technology at a pace and with a sense of urgency that the operational systems underneath were not set up to handle. Districts ended up using multiple ticketing systems, multiple asset management platforms, and multiple financial tools just to keep tabs on total inventory, device locations, repair histories, and costs. Getting anything useful out of that required serious manual effort to merge information across systems that were never designed to work together. It quickly resulted in what I would describe as a low-efficiency approach to understanding ROI, break/fix trends, and total cost of ownership.
That situation did not resolve itself when the urgency passed. Most districts are still working through it, with the same fragmented stack and the same manual coordination sitting between them and any answer they need.
The cost that never gets attributed correctly
This is where the problem gets consistently underestimated. When data lives in pieces across systems that do not connect, the work of pulling it together does not disappear. It gets absorbed by whoever is most capable and most organized. It just becomes invisible.
My coordinator Brandi is exceptional. She built a contract and subscription tracking system from scratch because no platform we had actually held that information in a useful way. Even the best tracking spreadsheet can only go so far when it comes to managing contracts, renewals, and budgets, and there is still a significant amount of manual coordination that has to happen around it. In districts that do not have someone like Brandi keeping close track, what tends to happen is that randomized attention gets paid to contracts and resources. The budget authority ends up relying on email notifications that a renewal is coming due. That effectively removes the ability to do any long-term budgetary planning around those expenses.
The cost of that situation is real. It just never shows up on any report as a line item, because the person absorbing it is the same person who would have to write the report.
What districts without developer resources are working with
Olympia has three developers. That is not typical. Districts without that capacity are either reliant on whatever commercial products are available to purchase, or they are dependent on multiple spreadsheets tracking different portions of asset management, help ticketing, contracts, and renewals in isolation from each other. Spreadsheets are useful, but developers and purpose-built products exist to build interconnected logic into systems, the kind of logic that makes different data sources aware of each other and usable together. Without that interconnected logic, the data stays in pieces and the manual coordination stays with whoever is willing to do it. In most districts that is one or two people, and when one of them leaves, the institutional knowledge that made the whole thing work leaves with them.
Where that invisible cost shows up most clearly
Device replacement planning is the clearest example of what happens when the data exists but cannot be used without manual coordination. I have done sessions at conferences on technology levy planning and device replacement cycles because most districts are still flying blind on this. When there is no solid plan behind replacement budgeting, the method by which those replacements happen becomes random and unstructured depending on device type. That makes it difficult to communicate to end users when equipment will be replaced, and it makes it very hard to build a credible multi-year budget case.
Having a clear replacement cycle based on solid experiential data is key. At Olympia we lock everything into replacement cycles so that our business office knows what we are committed to spend. Before that discipline existed here, the approach was more like: we have money this year, let us buy things. That is not equitable distribution of resources and it is not something you can sustain.
But sustaining that discipline requires the data to be usable without significant manual effort. In most districts it is not. It exists somewhere, but arriving at it means pulling from multiple systems and reconciling manually every time a decision needs to be made. Four to six weeks of work over the summer just to answer the question of what to buy next year. That is not a staffing problem. It is a data problem that gets billed as a staffing problem because the people doing the manual coordination are the most visible part of it.
The same dynamic plays out across procurement. When a district purchases a student-facing resource at Olympia, it needs to be evaluated from a curricular standpoint, a privacy standpoint, a web accessibility standpoint, a contractual standpoint, and a funding source standpoint. That involves four separate departments. More than likely each of those departments is keeping track of their portion in their own system, not something interdepartmentally collaborative. Any time multiple departments are working to achieve a singular goal but using their own independent systems, you greatly increase the risk of pieces being forgotten or not reported. The data exists in every one of those departments. The problem is that nobody has a complete picture, and assembling one requires manual coordination across departments every single time.
What running leaner actually reveals
At Olympia we are being asked to run leaner than ever before. That means maintaining an optimal level of efficiency across all aspects of the department while managing with fewer staff. A highly efficient team can make things look smooth, but there is a lot of effort happening behind the scenes to hold that together. When tasks start to pile up, whether that is a general increase in help tickets or something more specific like device diagnosis and repair backlogs, less staff means longer resolution times and a higher risk of incomplete or unaddressed work.
What tighter budgets and reduced staffing have done is make the manual coordination cost harder to hide. When you had more people, the invisible work got done and nobody asked too many questions about how. When you have fewer people, the same work takes longer or does not get done at all, and the consequences start showing up in places that are harder to ignore.
What I would tell another CIO
The operational complexity facing district technology teams is not going to reduce on its own. And I think the mistake a lot of districts make is treating it primarily as a capacity problem, looking for more staff or more budget, when the underlying issue is that the data does not flow in a way that supports the decisions the job actually requires. Most of the tools we use were built to hold information, not to help us act on it. You can pull a report and still have no clear answer about what to do next. That gap between having data and being able to make a confident decision from it is where a lot of time gets lost and where a lot of costly mistakes happen quietly.
The districts that manage this well have found ways to get their operational data connected and usable rather than leaving it distributed across systems that do not talk to each other. That requires discipline, real staff buy-in, and a willingness to look honestly at how much time and effort the current approach is actually costing. The manual coordination that holds most district operations together is not free just because it does not appear on a budget line. Districts that keep treating it as a staffing problem rather than a systems problem will keep arriving at the same place: capable people burning out on work that should not require a person at all.