In most organizations, a rough technology cutover means a bad Monday. In a school, it means a teacher improvising in front of thirty students while the lesson they planned sits on a device that won't start. That's why the calendar is the most important IT tool a school has.
Summer is the one long window when disruptive work costs nothing instructionally. Schools that treat June through August as a planned project season walk into the first day with everything tested. Schools that don't spend September firefighting. Here's the planning sequence we run with our school clients.
May: decide and order
- Walk every classroom with your teachers — they know which devices limp. Build the replacement list from the room, not the inventory spreadsheet.
- Order hardware early; education purchasing and shipping lead times eat weeks.
- Scope the big rocks — network upgrades, server or cloud migrations, new student-data systems — and pick what actually fits in one summer. One major project done well beats three done partially.
June–July: the heavy lifting
- Infrastructure first: cabling, Wi-Fi, switches — everything else depends on it.
- Image and configure devices in batches, including accessibility settings and specialized classroom tools, so setup isn't happening in August hallways.
- Review accounts: disable departed staff, prepare accounts for incoming hires, and check who can access student records against who should.
August: test like it's the first day
The step schools skip. Two weeks before staff return, run a first-day simulation: log in as a teacher, project a lesson, print, pull up your student information system, launch every app a first-period class needs. Every failure found in August is a non-event; the same failure on day one is a crisis with an audience.
If it's spring and no one has started this sequence, that's the conversation to have with your IT provider this week — and if their answer involves work during school hours, that's a different conversation.
Andrew — Founder, NextGen Strategy Partners
Veteran-owned managed IT for the nonprofits, schools, behavioral health providers, and medical & dental practices of McHenry & Lake Counties. Request a free security assessment →