Lebanon Community Unit School District 9: One IT Coordinator, 500 Chromebooks, and No Blind Spots
Sylvia Jenzewski is the entire IT department at Lebanon Community Unit School District 9 (Lebanon CUSD 9). On her own, she manages more than 500 student Chromebooks, about 130 Windows devices, the network, and security compliance.
"It means wearing every single hat at once," she said, "handling everything from physical network switches and server room locks to endpoint security, patching schedules, and teacher support."
She also knows the district's students by name. When they try to get around the web filter, she lets them know in the hallway that there's nothing they can hide from her.
Jenzewski came to the U.S. from Germany, studied network design, and joined the district as an intern during her last semester of college. She then spent four years as an IT assistant. Fast forward a few years, and when asked if she could run the department by herself, she said she was up for the challenge.
Today, Lebanon CUSD 9 uses GoGuardian Admin and GoGuardian Teacher to manage web access, support teachers, and catch risks early.
The challenge
Jenzewski stepped up during a hard stretch. The district went through three superintendents in four years amid financial issues, and its technology needed work. "We had a very old server," she shared.
To save money, the district paused GoGuardian for a year and relied on a Lightspeed filter alone. She was not pleased with the end result. "Sure, I could block something. I could put a certain search word in, but I didn’t see any outcome," she explained. "I couldn't see what students were doing. The teachers had no control at all."
Going without devices wasn't an option. Lebanon's curriculum runs on them, especially when it comes to online state testing. Without visibility, teachers had to enforce device boundaries themselves, which pulled focus from instruction. There was a lot of room for improvement.
Funding was the other hurdle. "When it comes to funding in larger schools, they have different little pots to pick from," said Dr. Donna Wood, a teacher and consultant who has worked alongside Jenzewski for years. "But when you're in a small rural school, and you start facing these cutbacks, it’s a lot harder to find the support you need."
The plan
"I was so desperate for a solution that we actively sought out external funding," Jenzewski said. Wood invited the Innovative Technology Education Fund, based in St. Louis, to visit the district.
Wood had an outside company survey the district's systems and documented everything it needed, which helped Lebanon win the grant. Jenzewski also helped convince the district's administrators and Board of Education to reinstate GoGuardian. The grant gave Jenzewski "a fresh start" with new devices and GoGuardian back in classrooms. "The teachers were super happy about it," she stated.
Once the district added GoGuardian Admin, she had one place to manage filtering, from YouTube access to rules for each organizational unit, with the central visibility she needed to stop putting out fires by hand.
Now her day starts in GoGuardian Admin's Smart Alerts. "Every morning I walk in and say, 'Okay, what is this?'" Before she blocks or unblocks a site, she checks it in the Simulator. "It tells me right away: Is it the category? Is it because I already had the block on?" From there, she makes changes in the Quick Editor.
When seniors need business websites, she can open them up immediately. "I unblock it right on the spot," she said. "It's really easy and saves a lot of time and stress for everybody."
Teachers can also unblock sites themselves. Wood used GoGuardian in her classroom when she taught technology and relied on it to keep students on the sites she assigned. If class finished early and students wanted to work on homework from another period, she explained she “could easily unblock that myself without calling the office.” Her advice to other teachers: "It will take a lot of things off your plate if you just take a few minutes to learn the program."
The impact
With central visibility into student traffic, web categories, and device activity, Jenzewski can resolve teacher requests quickly. "When a teacher comes to me with an issue...I can immediately identify the exact URL, filter rule, or policy causing it and adjust it in seconds, rather than having to manually inspect the individual device or guess what went wrong," she said.
That visibility also showed how students were getting around the filter.
"Everything comes in the disguise of something that looks legitimate and educational," she explained. "And the good thing is, GoGuardian says, 'Nope, that's a proxy.'"
Those proxies are a risk to the network as well as a distraction, and students share them. Within her first week using GoGuardian Admin, Jenzewski found students viewing explicit content through an archive website that no filter had caught before. "Students are smart, and it feels like we are always a step behind," she said, "but we can react much quicker to keep our students safe."
The emergence of AI added a new risk when Google's AI chat came out without warning. Google Workspace had no simple on/off switch, and students were using the AI chat functionality constantly. "They're talking to a machine more than to teachers in class," Jenzewski said.
GoGuardian also helps when parents raise concerns about screen time. When one family asked to opt their child out of device use, Jenzewski explained that state testing and parts of the curriculum are online, then told them about GoGuardian. "It puts parents at ease, too, that their child is protected," Wood said. "You don't let the kids out on the playground by themselves, so why would you let them on a computer by themselves?"
Keeping it going
The grant was a one-time boost. "That got us up and running again, but now we need to figure out how to sustain everything," Wood said. She believes Jenzewski's advocacy will make the difference. "The more she advocates and shows how GoGuardian is helping...that's going to be our saving grace to figure out where to get funding in the future."
Jenzewski is confident in the investment. "I have full trust that this is well-invested money," she said.
Asked what would break first if GoGuardian disappeared tomorrow, Jenzewski said, "Classroom management and web filtering visibility would break immediately. Teachers would lose their front-line oversight of student devices during lessons, and IT would revert to a purely reactive nature."
Her advice to other small districts considering cuts: "Cutting classroom management and filtering tools might look like an easy cost save on paper, but it creates hidden operational costs. Without these tools, teachers lose instructional time playing 'device police,' and our single-person IT team loses the central oversight required to keep the network safe and productive."
For Jenzewski, the work comes down to giving students structure. She knows students by name, and she sees clear boundaries as part of caring for them. “I protect them,” she said. “And maybe in a couple of years, when they’re done with college, they say, ‘Hey, that was great. Thank you.’”