e3 Civic High: Community Choice

[scerruti]

Stephen Cerruti
Technology Manager
e3 Civic High, San Diego, CA
https://www.e3civichigh.com

e3 Civic High is a public charter high school located in downtown San Diego. We are a unique school in that we occupy the 6th and 7th floor of the San Diego Library. We pride ourselves on being a Design Thinking school and we aggressively adapt technology to deliver on our mission to engage, educate, and empower our learning community to be caring, passionate, life-long learners and civic leaders that are prepared for college, workforce, and life.

• What solution (if any) were you using before JumpCloud?

  Although our school only has a current enrollment around 400 with a staff of about 70 we face a surprising number of challenges for a business our size. In addition to the government regulations faced when dealing with youth, schools have seen an increase in the number of cyberattacks over the past year. We have the challenge that our devices are carried and used by teenagers who may not always make the best decisions. JumpCloud for us is serving in the capacity of glueing together our many disparate platforms and providing a single point for identity management and asset assignment. It did not directly replace any systems but has taken on aspects of a variety of systems.

  • What was the challenge your company was facing that led you to considering JumpCloud?
    
    We have two very different classes of users, scholars and learning facilitators. (You may associate those with the terms "students" and "teachers". This means we rely on two different sources for personnel, our Student Information System and our Human Resources System (now Bamboo.) In addition we are a Google for Education school. We needed a solution to manage access to a variety of different tools and platforms that would integrate with all of the different systems we use. All of this had to happen with the very limited budget of a small charter high school and had to be highly available so that we did not interfere with our primary mission.
    • What made you choose JumpCloud as the solution to your needs?

      JumpCloud's API provides us the ability to connect all of our systems and keep them in sync. The flexible web interface is useful at our help desk, at my desk or when I am leading a class in one of our studios. The system's ability to allow us to quickly get information about how devices are deployed or to reassign devices as required are necessary as we manage a variety of device roles including one to one devices, studio (classroom) devices, staff only devices and lab devices accessible to all.

    • Could you tell us about your company’s environment? How many users? What resources do you manage, including devices + cloud/on-prem infrastructure + applications, etc.? 
      
      Our user base comes from Bamboo for staff and PowerSchool SIS for scholars. In addition we also use Google for Education to support our learning environment as well as provide services to and connectivity with our graduates . We employ Clever, an educational SSO product which then interfaces to many of our integrated Ed Tech products. We control access to licensed products from Apple, MicroSoft and Adobe through JumpCloud based groups. We are currently using Mosyle with Apple School Manager for MDM but are looking to move that to JumpCloud. Additionally we use SnipeIT for asset management and hope that JumpCloud could take over that role in the future as well. Finally we use Munki for our software management and self service portal. We hope that as patch management matures JumpCloud may move into that space or allow us to better manage Munki.
      
      We deal with unique software requirements like limitations on internet access, maintaining student privacy and secure testing environments. We currently maintain more than 400 active scholar MacBook Airs, a dozen standby machines for scholars when they forget them at home or forget to charge. Around 100 staff MacBook Air M1 and an equal number of iMacs used as staff machines, classroom computers or as desktops in our Digital Media Arts lab. 

    • Please also list any integrations, features, commands, policies, and anything else you’re using. Now’s your chance to tell us how awesome your project is and why it should win!
      
      Currently we have scripts in place that keep PowerSchool, Google, Bamboo and JumpCloud all in sync. These run each night. Our hope is to simplify both our enrollment and separation processes with the built in connections to Bamboo and with better scripting to remove the 13 step process it takes to separate a scholar in all our systems. With limited staff and laptops 'just breaking' all the time. reducing the management while maintaining or increasing security is a must have.

    • What are some results you’ve seen since implementing JumpCloud? What do you hope to achieve?
      
      When a scholar can't participate in a class activity because of a technology issue, they are missing out on learning. This can have compounded effects over time. Our goal is to respond to our user's needs to get them back to their learning environment as quickly as possible.

      
      We would like to increase the amount of automation in our IT systems to improve response times, allow for more self service and prevent errors that can lead to issues and security compromises. We want to be able to engage some of our scholars to help our in IT roles so they gain experience in real world systems. 
      
      In the next year we are facing a complete replacement of our network and phone systems from a third party to self managed system. We would like to see that be able to come only with authenticated WiFi access without an increase in our work effort. We would also like to be using JumpCloud in new ways to reduce the number of different systems we maintain.