The San Antonio district has 50,000 students, 110 school buildings and 7,000 faculty members. When Thompson arrived and was tasked with ramping up IT, he started assessing resources and reorganizing the IT structure, “putting the right people on the bus and getting them in a good seat.”
A year into that work, the pandemic struck, which he says was “a blessing” in some ways because they needed to redesign the infrastructure anyway. They already had been working on a 1:1 device strategy for students and those miles of fiber network. But what hadn’t been accounted for was the sheer volume of traffic they’d be getting when schools shut down. Thompson says they went from about 50,000 students hitting the data center to 150,000, as parents and faculty were getting online. And they were answering a ton of help desk calls.
Thompson’s role became, arguably, the most vital in the district – and one that can be polarizing, even for someone as helpful and humble as this CIO. Link to full article.