Linux-related job postings - Hopkinton NH School District

[Dan Jenkins]

Randy Edwards wrote:
>  > I've seen a parallel situation elsewhere and it was because they had
>  > one guy who was doing both jobs and was totally burned out and
>  > threatened to quit for two years running if they didn't hire a second
>  > person, and then finally quit, so they decided to hire a second person.
> 
>    This is very common in educational technology.  I've seen many teachers 
> work their way into edtech jobs, only to stay a year or two and then run as 
> fast as they can back into the classroom.
> 
>    Compsci people (read:mainstream IT) people will similarly stay a year or 
> two to gain some experience, and then go into business IT.  You can't really 
> blame them, the money is much better and the work is less.
> 
>    If one looks at the NumOfComputers-to-TechPerson support ratios, like many 
> things in education, edtech is wildly underfunded.

One of our clients is an elementary-middle school. They have a few 
hundred Windows desktops with three Linux servers and one Windows server.

They have ONE person who supports all of them - in addition to teaching 
computer lab classes 4-6 hours per day, preparing grant requests, budget 
proposals, sitting on tech committees, complying with federal, state and 
SAU mandates, etc.

We help support them. We probably get paid for less than half what they 
need. We "donate" the rest of our labor, when we can.

Their sole "IT" staffer has told us quite seriously if we ever stop 
supporting them, she'll quit.

We have been considering switching them to Linux desktops (mainly to 
alleviate the spyware/virus problems), but, of course, many folk have 
some "must have" Windows application. (Internet Explorer is mandated by 
their testing service for all students thrice a year.) And, there is no 
money, and, as importantly, no time, to even start.

Good luck to anyone considering a tech career in education.

On the bright (and Linux) side, we leverage Linux (and F/OSS) heavily to 
keep things running as smoothly as we can. Samba, Apache, Squid, PHP, 
Postfix, Courier IMAP, Cron, IPTables, OpenOffice, among others, and 
lots of Bash and Perl scripts make it all work.

To be honest, we do hope to (finally) start deploying some Linux 
desktops this new year. And finish switching most over to OpenOffice. 
And start using Linux Partimage to reimage the Windows desktops 
automatically in case of problems. So, progress does happen.
-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support for over a Quarter Century