The American public education system affects seismic change. Best-fit technology that improves the learning environment, supports educators and enables schools to achieve their goals can be a bulwark against uncertainty. The school district of Eagle County in Colorado is ahead of the challenge thanks to a sensible IT transformation trip.
Public educators constantly navigate bureaucracy, standardized test mandates and shift of guidelines that have been specified by people who have never participated in a classroom. They adapt to new curricula, funding and the changing political landscapes, often without a say in the decisions that you and your students affect.
The countless story of people who choose a career in public education is calm heroism, a personal victim and deep resilience. While teachers are often praised in broad strokes, the daily realities of their work – the emotional weight, the systemic challenges and the invisible victories – rarely get the attention they deserve. The most important thing may be that educators are driven to the purpose.
Jack Donnelly
In Eagle County, Colorado, the technology organization of an innovative school district supports its critical educational mission. “In the Eagle County School District (ECSD), the technology is more than just the infrastructure,” said CTO Jack Donnell. “It is an essential enabling of learning, connection and operational excellence in our schools and community.”
Eagle County is known for its ski areas of world class Vail and Beaver Creek and houses around 55,000 inhabitants. Your district serves around 6,500 K-12 students and offers early learning for 300 children of preschool age as well as another 50 infants and toddlers.
The ECSD comprises eight primary schools, five middle schools, four high schools, a charter school, an early learning center and an online learning academy to support various educational needs. “Our mission is to offer safe and committed learning environments in which the students creative and active heads, compassion for others, a passion for lifelong learning and the courage to realize their dreams,” added a passion, “added Donnelly.
By supporting the base, strategic leadership and technological advances, the ECSD improves both school and teacher success and at the same time navigates the financing restrictions and the systemic challenges. Basic organizations such as the Education Foundation of Eagle County (EFEC) are essential support for the district, bridge financing gaps, combating critical needs, promoting changes and the enrichment of education experience.
In 2024 alone, EFEC's efforts had an impact on 2 million US dollars on the ECSD. However, EFEC and other basic organizations do more than just Bridge financing gaps. They create sensible opportunities for students and ensure that every child has access to high -quality education, enrichment programs and the support that needs it to thrive.
Climbing into the cloud
Donnelly joined the organization in 2023 and scolded an IT transformation that touched every aspect of the work of the district: hugging cloud technology.
The trip included the technology that supplies lessons in the classroom, the Student Information System (SIS) and the core systems that keep the district smoothly. The aim of the project was to strengthen the security of mission-critical information goods, the increase in the journey by installing the applications in top steps in the top levels with redundancy, where this is always possible in their infrastructure, and the operational support costs by reducing servers, storage, security and associated software license costs. The transformation enabled the IT organization to focus more on strengthening work culture.
Improvement of your Infosec organizational skills, EDR, user training programs and IT operating processes has significantly expanded your attitude towards information security. “We were able to renew our cyber insurance policy, while many other public education organizations were not able,” he noted, adding that the efforts increased the cover and reduce their premiums.
“Each of these investments played an important role in modernizing our IT operations, improving the security and improvement of our ability to support students and employees. They also demonstrated the strategic value when it comes to driving sensible changes in the entire district.”
Eighteen school buildings serve around 6,500 students, all of whom use a chromebook provided by district for almost every subject or class. “An internet failure brings a school out of business. Even a 10-minute internet failure during the first school lesson will have harmful effects all day.” The implementation of SD-WAN has significantly advanced your information security. During the school year 2023-24, the ECSD suffered about 93 failures, 473.13 hours downtime and the destruction of 56,186 students/classes. The upgrade reduced the failures by 80%.
The shift lowered telecommunications costs by 15% and dramatically increased the availability of the Internet. The savings were used to finance the MSP support in order to build up the skills of the IT team, which led to better use of tools for mobile device management and implementing new network devices.
The transformative force of it
“Our team focused on improving organizational culture, improving our cyber security, improving school safety and improving the Internet availability in our schools. In order to promote a positive work environment, we have highlighted team construction, strategic attitude and performance management,” said Donnelly.
Of course, school security has a top priority. For this purpose, the team expanded the coverage of video security and the structure of the access control system and implemented targeted warnings that require immediate response to weaknesses for critical facilities. Improvements in the content filtering solution help prevent the pupils from accessing the pupils, and flags browser patterns that can indicate risks of damage to themselves or others.
In addition to the migration of its SIS and ERP systems in the cloud, the ECSD also opted for the island of Enterprise Browser solution and Crowdstrikes Falcon Complete EDR solution from Falcon, which played a crucial role in improving security, operational efficiency and the responsiveness throughout the district.
“In the summer of 2024 we successfully developed and provided a safe solution for mobile access solution for our SIS. Before that, administrators were only able to access student data by with a laptop exhibited by district-registering a process, which was included in the emergency after the time after the events, was immediately accessible to the information. and significant effects. ” “In addition to its functional advantages, this solution has strengthened organizational support for the IT team.
Crowdstrikes Falcon Complete solution was equally critical of the strengthening of cybersecurity farming from ECSD. “While we already used crowdstrikes endpoint protection, we lacked internal resources to consistently analyze potential weaknesses and react to potential weaknesses,” he announced. “The partnership with crowdstrikes managed security experts has enabled us to continuously monitor and quick reaction functions, close a crucial security gap and calm us to concentrate on other strategic initiatives.”
The migration of your SIS and ERP systems in the cloud has also released time and resources for the teams for infrastructure and application management so that you can become a more proactive partner for the ECSD business and academic teams. Eliminating the need for local servers, memory and software licenses was an excellent cost saver.
“The structure of swing for transformation is always the most difficult part. It requires courage, persistence and willingness to disturb trust. Fortunately, we had people who longed for changes for a long time, and their attorney found a new life for them.
“At the end of the day, the success of this transformation is not about me – it's about it. The team did it. They have taken the risks that made progress and proved that changes are possible. The difference is the difference.”
The undefeated history of public educators is a love, struggle and an adequate belief in the power of education. They are often undervalued, but they continue because they know that their work changes life – a student, a lesson and one moment after another.
The school district of Eagle County is an innovative district of 18 schools who serve 6,500 students in Vail Valley. We have 8 primary schools, 3 middle schools, 3 high school and 1 K-8 school, a charter academy and a 5th to 12th ski and snowboard academy. As a district, we become a world-class system by modeling our approach according to the proven top international actors.
The most important thing is that our community supports and respects, parents are involved and helpful, and we have unprecedented access to all-year-old outdoor activities and opportunities for scholarships with friends and colleagues. We are only looking for the best candidates because we know that the best way to improve the results for students is to improve the quality of their lessons. Better teachers, better results.