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Schools

You get ten weeks a year to do the work.

A school runs on a calendar nobody can move. Everything disruptive has to happen in the summer, everything has to work on the first day of term, and for nine months after that the network carries several hundred children who did not choose any of it. Iconium plans around that calendar instead of against it.

Summer
The only real maintenance window
24/7
Threat monitoring
Under 2 hrs
First response, business hours
$0
Trip charges

What actually goes wrong in a school

The calendar problems

  • A device fleet that has to be collected, wiped, re-imaged and handed back out in the weeks before term, every year
  • Work that needs the network down, when the network is never down between September and June
  • Hundreds of student accounts created and retired on the same two days of the year
  • A new intake of staff who all need setting up in the same week

The rest of the year

  • The student information system or parent portal unreachable on a report day, with several hundred families refreshing it
  • Broken screens and lost chargers, continuously, forever
  • Ransomware — schools are targeted precisely because budgets are thin and downtime is unbearable
  • Tuition and fee data, financial aid applications and family records, all in one small office

The thing most providers get wrong about private schools

Search for school IT support and you will find a lot of pages promising FERPA compliance. For most private and parochial schools, that is the wrong answer to the wrong question.

FERPA probably does not apply to you

The regulation is explicit. It applies to an educational agency or institution to which funds have been made available under any program administered by the Secretary of Education. A private school taking no such funding is generally outside it altogether.

That is worth knowing before you buy something sold on the strength of it.

What does reach you

  • Your enrollment contract and privacy notice — promises to families you can be held to
  • Your diocese, association or accreditor, which may set its own standards
  • Your insurer, increasingly asking the same security questions as everyone else’s
  • Ohio law on student data, and your agreements with each edtech vendor
  • CIPA filtering, if you take E-Rate discounts — see below

So the honest framing is not compliance. It is duty of care to children and a set of promises you made to parents, which is a higher bar than a regulation would have set and a better reason to do the work.

E-Rate, if you are not already using it

E-Rate is the federal program that discounts internet access and network equipment for schools, and non-profit private and parochial schools are eligible, not just public districts. Schools operating for profit, or holding endowments over $50 million, are not.

It covers the two things schools most need and least want to pay for: the connection itself, and the internal network — switching, cabling, wireless and the maintenance of it. If you take those discounts, CIPA applies as a condition, which means an internet safety policy and content filtering.

We are not E-Rate consultants and we do not file for you. What we do is make sure the network we design is the network the program will fund, and that the filtering is in place either way. Plenty of small schools never apply because nobody told them they qualified.

The controls we run

For the children

  • DNS and web content filtering, on school devices and on the school network
  • Application allow-listing, so a shared device stays a school device
  • Managed device fleets: imaging, re-deployment and the August turnaround

For the office

  • Multi-factor authentication and identity hardening for staff
  • Reviewed access controls, so a teacher who changes role changes access
  • Email security and quarantine, which is where the tuition-payment fraud arrives

Keeping it up

  • Managed detection and response, 24/7
  • Patch and vulnerability management, scheduled around the calendar rather than through it
  • Wireless design that holds up when every device in the building wakes at once

Recovery and planning

  • Backup verification and recovery testing for student records and school files
  • Quarterly planning, so the summer list is written in February rather than June
  • Security awareness training for staff, and evidence you can show a board

Who we actually work with

Saint Rita School on Baldwin Road in Solon is an Iconium client: a Catholic parish school running preschool through grade eight, on the same site since 1949. It is exactly the kind of school this page is written about — a real calendar, a real device fleet, and a parish next door.

We also support Saint Rita Parish. Where a parish runs both a school and a congregation, the two are usually one engagement rather than two, and the summer maintenance window and the weekend broadcast get planned against each other rather than colliding.

Solon is also where our own office is, a few minutes up the road. See the church IT page for the congregation side.

Where our responsibility stops

  • We are not your privacy counsel and we do not decide what your enrollment contract commits you to.
  • We do not file E-Rate applications or act as your consultant for the program.
  • Your student information system, learning platform and tuition vendors keep their own support obligations. We manage the environment they run in.
  • Filtering is a tool, not a guarantee. It belongs alongside supervision and a policy, and any provider telling you software alone solves this is overselling.

What it costs

The same published rates: $163 per user, $19 per computer, $100 per server, $17 per mailbox and $179 per additional location, per month. A fully equipped seat is $199 all in. Worth noting for a school: student devices are charged at the per-computer rate rather than as full seats, which is what keeps a one-to-one fleet affordable. See the pricing page.

We support schools across Northeast Ohio. Parochial schools attached to a congregation we already support are a common arrangement — see our church IT page.

Questions schools ask us

Probably not, and be careful of anyone who tells you otherwise without asking. The regulation applies to an institution to which funds have been made available under a program administered by the Secretary of Education. A private or parochial school taking no such funding generally falls outside it. What does bind you is your enrollment contract and privacy notice, any standard set by your diocese, association or accreditor, your agreements with edtech vendors, and Ohio law on student data. Those are usually a higher bar than FERPA anyway, which is the point we would rather make than sell you a compliance package.

Yes, if it is non-profit, provides elementary or secondary education under state law, and does not hold an endowment over $50 million. It is not a public-schools-only programme, and a surprising number of small private schools never apply because nobody told them they qualified. It discounts internet access and internal network equipment — switching, cabling and wireless. We do not file the applications, but we will make sure what we design is what the programme funds.

Summer, and we plan for it in February rather than June. The whole point of quarterly planning in a school is that the list of things needing the network down gets written months ahead, scoped, and then executed in the window that actually exists. Anything that can be done live, we do live. Anything that cannot waits for the break — and that means someone has to be thinking about it in winter.

Collection, wipe, re-image and re-deployment in the August turnaround, and managed enrolment so a replacement device is ready rather than rebuilt. On pricing, student devices are charged at the per-computer rate rather than as full seats, which is what makes a fleet affordable — a school with 40 staff and 300 student devices is not paying for 340 users.

No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Filtering on the devices and on the network stops the obvious and the accidental, which is most of it. It does not replace supervision or an acceptable use policy, and a determined teenager is a different problem from a curious nine-year-old. If you take E-Rate discounts, filtering is a condition of them. If you do not, it is still a duty of care to the children and a promise you made to their parents.

It is extremely common and it is not a criticism of them — they are usually doing it well and for free on top of a full workload. The two risks are that everything lives in one person’s head, and that they are not in a position to say no to the head of school about a security decision. Co-managed arrangements work well here: they keep the relationships and the day-to-day, we take the parts needing 24/7 coverage, specialist tooling and an audit trail.

Email security and quarantine catches most impersonation before anyone sees it, multi-factor authentication means a stolen password is not enough, and simulated phishing means the person in the office has seen the pattern before. The control that matters most is a callback rule on a known number for any change to payment details — and the head of school has to back the office when they use it.

We plan for a clean handover and never withhold data or school intellectual property. We work with whoever comes next, including a returning volunteer or teacher, and hand over documentation rather than a shrug. Onboarding in the other direction takes about a week, with terms of twelve, twenty-four or thirty-six months and no setup fee.

Planning the summer list?

Call (440) 991-9980 or book a thirty minute call. February and March are the right time to have this conversation. June is not.

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