Before March, the chief technology officers who keep modern classrooms connected would have agreed that new tech programs can’t be rolled out overnight. Yet that’s exactly what they have been doing for the past eight months as pandemic shut downs forced school districts to go virtual.

IT staffers scrambled to purchase thousands of new devices and provide Wi-Fi for students. One Texas school district fielded 35,000 calls to its technology help desk on the first day of remote classes. Another in Oregon launched an Amazon-style locker system for students to exchange broken devices.

“It seems like since March we’ve not stopped. Even in my dreams I’m solving problems,” says Pete Just, chief technology officer for Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township, whose Indiana district serves about 16,500 students. “Thankfully I have an amazing staff who are very seasoned … I had a number of meetings and said, ‘Here’s the problem, how do we even begin to solve it?’”

Among the earliest challenges CTOs faced was how to get thousands of laptops and tablets for students and staff一while every school district in the country was trying to do the same thing.

“It has been 12-hour days or more,” said Lorrie Owens, chief technology officer for the San Mateo County Office of Education in Redwood City, Calif. “When we went into shelter-in-place on March 17, we were clearing out Chromebook carts [not only] for students but also for our own employees. We’re clearing everything we’ve got in terms of spares and putting emergency orders to get devices in for our employees.”

Steven Langford, chief information officer of Beaverton School District in Beaverton, Ore., had 24 hours to transition 5,000 staff members into remote work when the district closed in March. Then his team had until the end of spring break to execute a remote learning strategy for the district’s more than 41,000 students.

Langford said the district had discussed a one-to-one Chromebook plan for years and an evening technology help desk for students. In a matter of weeks after the shutdown, both ideas were launched.

“As soon as we distributed our devices to our elementary students, possible or not we had to create a student help desk,” he said. “Previously we would take months to study and pilot it and do some testing. When you’re faced with, ‘It must be done and we've got a couple days,’ people’s vision of what is possible shifts.”

Read the full article about the pressure for school tech departments by Nadia Tamez-Robledo at EdSurge.