Most districts still struggle to fill specialist roles
The hardest roles to fill in a school district, according to new survey data from eSchool News, are special education teachers, school psychologists, and nurses. That's not IT. But it lands on your desk anyway, and here's how.
When a district can't hire a school psychologist, it often tries to bridge the gap with teletherapy platforms, remote evaluation tools, and video conferencing setups that need to actually work. When it can't staff the nurse's office reliably, someone starts talking about health monitoring software. When special ed caseloads overflow, the answer frequently involves more assistive technology, more devices, more licensing, more you.
The pattern is consistent enough by now that it deserves a name. Call it the staffing-to-infrastructure transfer. A human role goes unfilled, and the district's instinct is to patch it with a tool. Sometimes that's reasonable. Often it just means IT absorbs the operational weight of a problem it didn't create and can't actually solve.
The survey found most districts are still struggling to fill these positions, not just some districts, not districts in rural or low-income areas specifically. Most. That's a wide distribution of the problem, which means the pressure to compensate with technology is also widely distributed.
None of this is the vendor's fault, exactly. The tools that support remote psych evaluations or speech therapy or specialized reading instruction are real and some of them are genuinely useful. The problem is the sequence: understaffing first, technology second, IT budget last. You find out about the new teletherapy contract when someone emails you a login and asks why it isn't working.
If you're not already in the room when your district discusses coverage gaps in these roles, that's worth fixing before the next tool arrives unannounced.
Featured articles
Project Management vs. Change Management: How Are They Different, and Why Are Both Needed in Schools?
CoSN put out a piece distinguishing project management from change management, and the short version is: project management is how you ship the thing, change management is how you get people to actually use it. You probably know this already from experience, specifically the experience of watching a perfectly executed deployment collect dust while teachers keep doing what they were doing before. The article is aimed at school IT leaders making the case upward, which is where this distinction actually matters. "We need a change management plan" lands differently in a budget meeting than "we need more PD hours."
4 more states require districts to adopt AI policies
Idaho, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Virginia now require districts to adopt AI policies, not just read state guidance. That is a real shift. Thirty-four states had issued guidance as of last fall; most of it sat in a folder somewhere. Mandating a local policy at least forces the conversation to happen. Oklahoma goes further and prohibits AI from being the primary tool for grading, discipline, or other high-stakes decisions, which is the kind of line your superintendent will want to see before anyone signs a vendor contract. If your state is next, start the policy draft before the law tells you to.
ISTELive 26: This STEM Loaner Library Checks Out
Andy Mann at Muskegon Area ISD built a loaner library of STEM gear so teachers can borrow a $10,000 VR headset for three weeks before anyone has to commit to buying a fleet of them. The funding angle is what makes it worth stealing: cooperative Chromebook purchasing flows a cut back to the program, so every device order in his region quietly subsidizes the next round of equipment. In a post-ESSER world where every line item needs a justification, "try before you buy" is a better pitch to a board than "trust us."
Handling Student Personal Relationships With AI
Students are forming romantic relationships with AI chatbots, and some are turning to them for mental health support with results that have occasionally been fatal. Character AI and Replika get most of the press, but Kerry Gallagher at ConnectSafely points out that plain ChatGPT and Gemini can pull students in just as deep. You probably can't filter your way out of this one. A student with a phone and a free account is outside your perimeter entirely. What you can do is make sure your staff knows this is happening, because most of them still don't believe it.
Tech tip of the week
Enable ChromeOS auto-updates: configure LTC channel for stability and security
If your district is still on the default Stable channel and letting devices update on whatever schedule Google ships, you are one bad rollout away from a very bad week. The Long-Term Support channel exists for exactly your situation: it gets security patches without pulling in every new feature Chrome ships that month.
To move your fleet there, open the Google Admin console, go to Devices, then Chrome, then Settings, then Device Settings. Filter by the OU you want, find Auto Update Settings, and set the Release Channel to Long-Term Stable. While you are in there, set the Restrict Google Chrome version to a minimum build so devices cannot fall behind.
The LTS channel updates roughly every six months for feature releases, but security fixes still come through regularly. You get a stable, predictable platform that your teachers stop noticing, which is the goal. The best OS update is the one nobody files a ticket about.
Pass This Along
If a colleague or coworker in K12 IT would find this useful, forward it. They can subscribe free and get their own copy every Monday.