Background
Calcasieu Parish is a preK-12 school district that teaches over 30,000 students in Southwest Louisiana. Although the district is back on its feet, Calcasieu Parish faced incredibly difficult circumstances in 2020, both from the COVID-19 pandemic and two devastating hurricanes. These challenges highlighted the inefficiencies in their tech stack, and emphasized how necessary it was to use modern tools to keep teaching and learning going during trying times.
Lisa Mullett, Calcasieu Parish’s Tech Support Coordinator, helped organize the search for a new help ticketing and asset management system.
“We’d been looking for a new help desk system because ours was very antiquated,” Mullett said. “And at the same time, our superintendent asked us to take over the fixed assets for our district.”
After a lengthy search, Mullett found Incident IQ—the workflow management platform built for K-12 districts.
“We immediately saw what a good fit Incident IQ was, because it was the only one truly built for K-12,” said Mullett. “I can’t imagine our life here without Incident IQ. It has solved so many problems for us.”
Powerful integrations, detailed analytics, and easy-to-use deployment tools made Incident IQ the perfect fit for Calcasieu Parish’s IT needs.
Incident IQ’s unmatched deployment and tracking processes
After a challenging start to their 2020 school year, Calcasieu Parish was finally able to tackle their one-to-one device initiative. However, their homegrown tech stack was making that challenge incredibly strenuous.
“All of a sudden, we had 30,000 more devices on our network, and we had to figure out how to get them to our kids and check them out,” Mullett recalled.
“We had this homemade system that was working, but it couldn’t scale to what we needed. We struggled to get computers to the students. When we saw that Incident IQ had [device checkout tools] for students, it was like magic for us. It was perfect.”
Incident IQ features a deployment and collection tool called Rollout Scout. With this intuitive tool, K-12 districts can check devices in and out with a simple scan of a student ID and an asset tag, and be utilized by anyone in the district with very little training.
“Our team immediately loved it,” said Mullett. “We bought scanners for all the schools so they could scan the devices, and we provided the labels for student devices. We went through that complete cycle of check-in and check-out, and we didn’t have any problems. Everybody was happy.”
Device deployment and collection is a huge undertaking for school districts, but Rollout Scout from Incident IQ can greatly reduce the amount of time the deployment process takes.
“I can’t imagine another platform that would be that easy to deploy. I really can’t,” said Mullett.
Integrations and workflows built for K-12 IT workflows
As Lisa Mullett started using Incident IQ, she quickly realized how user-friendly Incident IQ’s workflows were.
“It spoke our language,” Mullet explained. “[Incident IQ] knows that teachers have classrooms, and we need to know the room number, we need to know who the students are.”
Incident IQ is designed to serve K-12 districts in a way that industry-neutral platforms can’t match. That means providing IT teams with rich, API-driven integrations to work with the systems they use every day.
“Because Incident IQ is integrated with Microsoft Intune, our MDM platform, all the data is there. Our help desk technicians can locate these devices from within the ticket, and they love it.”
Incident IQ’s integrations seamlessly connects Calcasieu Parish’s student, asset, and account data, simplifying the amount of legwork needed when a help ticket comes in.
“Everything is integrated in that one interface,” said Mullett. “Our Intune, assets, students, even fees. Because everything is right there in one dashboard, that’s a big win for everybody.”
That simplicity was essential when Calcasieu Parish implemented their one-to-one device policy.
“After we gave out these 30,000 devices to the students, they quickly started coming in with things like broken screens and keyboards at a high volume,” Mullett recalled. “Our administration created the policy that students needed to be given fees for these broken parts.”
To address this need, Calcasieu Parish’s IT team utilized Fee Tracker, a modular application for Incident IQ to attach school-related fees to users, assets, and help tickets.
“With Fee Tracker, it was just so easy. You don’t have to look in several places to keep track of everything. Everything’s all in the ticket, all documented.”
Incident IQ’s unified platform helped Calcasieu Parish accurately manage and support their K-12 IT needs.
“Modern tools help make everything easier—more efficient,” said Mullett.
Detailed analytics provide actionable insights
Incident IQ’s comprehensive integrations also alleviated one of the biggest burdens on K-12 IT teams: reporting.
“The state reporting was something that we dreaded at the end of every year, and it was terrible,” said Mullett.
“In our state, we have this big report at the end of the year. With a few filters and views in Incident IQ, you get all the answers to this report. It knows how many devices are checked out by grade level. If [the state] wants to know how many devices are older than this date, it’s right there in the report. You can save your views and you have that information at any time. The reports and filters are very powerful, and we use them a lot.”
Not only did Incident IQ’s detailed reporting help end-of-year analytics, it also created a huge impact on Calcasieu Parish’s IT team itself.
Previously, Calcasieu Parish’s IT team was composed of four help desk technicians and two hardware repair engineers. The small but mighty team was struggling to keep up with the demands of such a large school district, so they used analytics from Incident IQ to petition the board for additional IT employees.
“We used the dashboard that shows the average time it takes for a ticket to be worked. We took all the analytics from Incident IQ and made a new, one-page infographic for our CTO to explain our needs to the board. This showed them how many tickets we had this year, and how many repairs we made.”
The Calcasieu Parish tech team was incredibly pleased as the board reviewed the data and granted their request—by double the amount they asked for.
“We asked for three positions, and they said, ‘With these numbers, it sounds like you need more than that.’ Because of Incident IQ and their reporting, our board added seven new positions to our team. It was amazing.”
Incident IQ’s analytics provide K-12 districts with the big picture, so schools can make informed decisions for district support teams.
Next-level product and customer support for K-12 teams
But there was one aspect of Incident IQ that Calcasieu Parish’s IT team weren’t expecting: the support we showed their district throughout the entire process.
“During our onboarding, we went through everything, and [Incident IQ] showed us how everything worked. It was easy. If we had any kind of problem or questions—even when we hit a little wall—we called the support team, and it was just fantastic. They can usually solve the problem in just a quick phone call,” said Mullett.
At Incident IQ, our mission is to do more than provide the tools for better K-12 IT support: we want to do everything we can to help teachers, students, and staff thrive.
If your district is considering a change in their digital tech stack, give us a call. Our integrations, deployment tools, and analytics streamline workflows for IT teams so that teachers and students have the tools they need to learn and grow.