The Year My Eye Stopped Twitching

For my first few years as a technology director, my right eye started twitching about a week before school started. It kept going until sometime in October.

I want to tell you I found that alarming, but I didn’t. I found it normal, almost expected. August was hard, everybody knew August was hard, and my body had apparently decided to keep the calendar for me. It took me longer than it should have to realize that the twitch wasn’t about August. August was just when the bill came due for technology director burnout.

Touching everything, owning everything, consulted on none of it

Here is what our department actually looked like in those years.

Inside the team, we shared ownership of everything. That sounds collaborative, but in practice it meant that every task was technically everyone’s and therefore reliably nobody’s, and the things that got done were the things somebody happened to remember at the right moment. Our system was a group of people trying very hard.

Outside the team, we were assumed to own every digital system in the district. Not the ones we chose. All of them. A department would find a platform they loved, sign up, get a login, and then discover in week two that it needed to talk to the student information system. That’s when we found out it existed. We had no seat in the decision and full responsibility for the consequence.

So we touched every part of the school day. Instruction, operations, enrollment, assessment, accountability, communication, safety. And when it all worked, nobody had any reason to think about us at all. When one piece of it didn’t, everyone had exactly one place to look for answers.

That’s the part that wears on you. Not the volume of work, though the volume was real. Carrying accountability for a hundred things you were never invited to decide or even informed about is a heavy load.

What actually changed

None of this got fixed in one summer. It took several years, and most of it was unglamorous.

We named owners for systems, and some of them weren’t us. Every system got one name attached to it, with the authority that has to come with the name. This is where a lot of districts stop short, because naming an owner means someone has to be able to say no. For example, IT should not own the enrollment process. We support it. We integrate it. We are not the ones who should decide how families move through it.

We asked staff what kept tripping them up. Then we did something with the answers. Some of what came back turned into checklists staff could run themselves, small things they’d been submitting tickets for because nobody had ever shown them the two clicks. The rest turned into proactive steps for our team, work we could do in July so that nobody had to ask for it in August.

We automated the work nobody should be doing by hand. Account creation. Rostering. The tedious, high-volume, deadline-shaped tasks that used to eat the first two weeks of every year. Interoperability sounds like a procurement word until you realize it’s the difference between your team building relationships in September and your team typing, importing, and exporting all month.

We made asking for help easy. We moved to a help desk that staff found intuitive, and that mattered more than any feature comparison we ran. A ticket system people don’t understand doesn’t reduce interruptions. It just moves them to the hallway, where they arrive with no record, no priority, and no way to spot the pattern.

What it didn’t fix

The work didn’t shrink. I want to be honest about that, because the promise that better systems mean less work is not one I can make. New platforms still appeared. Things still broke in the first week. People still walked into my office at 7:40 with a laptop held out like a wounded bird.

What changed is that the work had somewhere to live. There was a name on it, a path for it, a place it went. I stopped being the single point of failure for a district’s worth of digital systems, which meant I could take a Thursday off without the whole thing holding its breath.

And somewhere in there, the twitch stopped. I noticed in hindsight, the way you notice a headache you’ve stopped having. Just one August, it never arrived.

The default nobody voted on

Of those four moves, naming owners is the one districts skip. I see it constantly now that I’m working across a lot of them, and it’s skipped for an understandable reason: the other three can be done inside the technology office. That one can’t.

Somewhere along the way, districts adopted a rule nobody ever said out loud. If it plugs into the network or lives online, technology owns it.

None of us signed up for that rule, and honestly, none of us saw it coming. We didn’t know what we were getting into when suddenly everything was online. But look at what sits on the technology team’s plate in a lot of districts now: data and state reporting, family and staff communications, HVAC, access controls, security cameras, and athletics technology down to the scoreboard and the huddle camera.

Technology can support every one of those. Technology should support every one of those. Supporting them is not the same as owning them, and a team that owns all of it is a team on a countdown. That isn’t a workload problem you can solve with better time management. There is no version of that list a person can hold.

If it’s September and you recognize yourself here

You are not behind, and you are not bad at this. You are holding a set of responsibilities that accumulated because no one else claimed them, in a role where success is silent and failure has your name on it.

The way out isn’t doing less. It’s making sure every piece of what you carry has an owner, a process, or a place to go, so that the system doesn’t depend on you remembering it. If you want a place to start, the ownership audit we used is simple but effective. Every system, one name.

Matt Holley, Dr. Matthew X. Joseph, and I discussed this last spring in a webinar about “other duties as assigned” and the hats we all end up wearing. You can read more about about tackling the K-12 CTO burnout in our recent article based on that discussion in THE Journal.

My eye and I are doing fine now. If yours is doing something new and unusual this week, it’s worth listening to what your body is saying.