Somewhere in the procurement history of almost every school district and independent school, there is a decision that looks, on paper, like a technology choice. A phone system was replaced. A cloud platform was selected. A contract was signed.
What that decision actually determined — whether the school's communications would keep working during an outage, whether staff could reach each other during a lockdown — was never explicitly asked. It was just inherited from a procurement process that wasn't designed to answer those questions.
Think about what that means in practice. A lockdown is called. A teacher needs to reach the office. A principal needs to reach every classroom simultaneously. A district coordinator needs to reach first responders. In that moment, nobody is thinking about whether the cloud provider is having an outage. Nobody is thinking about whether the VPN is working. They're thinking about the kids in the building.
That's exactly when the architecture either holds or it doesn't. And in most schools, nobody has explicitly verified which one is true.
What the Data Suggests About Where Schools Actually Are
Frost & Sullivan research on education IT decision-makers is useful here because it highlights a tension that the procurement process tends to obscure.
Over 65% of education IT leaders expect hybrid communication models — combining on-premises and cloud infrastructure — to remain the dominant architecture through 2028. That preference exists because people with direct operational experience have concluded that cloud-only architectures carry risks that aren’t acceptable in school environments. The same research shows that 62% of education IT leaders identify downtime due to connectivity issues as a barrier to efficiency. These aren’t theoretical concerns. They are documented operational experience, translated into architectural preference.
At the same time, 72% of education IT decision-makers identify the burden of too many fragmented communication tools as a significant problem. That figure reflects the outcome of a different kind of delegation: years of individual procurement decisions, each solving a local problem, accumulating into a communications environment that nobody deliberately designed and that IT teams are now responsible for maintaining.
The (Mostly) Unstated Requirement
There is one requirement that changes the entire shape of a communications procurement conversation, that is directly relevant to school safety, and that most boards have never formally stated: “Our communications systems must remain operational during internet outages.”
That’s it. A single-sentence policy position that boards are entirely within their authority to assert, because it connects directly to the emergency preparedness obligations they’ve already accepted.
When that requirement is stated explicitly before procurement begins, several things happen. Architectures that can’t meet it become ineligible, regardless of how compelling their other features are. Vendors who can meet it are required to explain specifically how — through local survivability, edge components, or hybrid configurations. And the conversation between IT leadership and the board becomes substantive in a way it typically isn’t, because there’s now a clear policy question that the board has answered and that IT is implementing.
What the Staffing Shortage Exacerbates
There is a compounding factor that makes this governance gap harder to close over time.
School IT teams are small and getting smaller relative to the demands placed on them. With an estimated 36,500 teacher vacancies nationally and 60% of principals reporting difficulty filling non-teaching positions, IT staff are routinely absorbing responsibilities that have nothing to do with communications infrastructure. The people best positioned to surface survivability concerns to leadership are often the people least available to do so.
This is the operational context behind the finding that nearly two-thirds of education IT decision-makers expect to rely on managed services by 2028 for critical communications functions. Managed services aren’t primarily a cost decision in this environment. They’re a capacity decision: a recognition that the internal expertise and bandwidth to monitor, maintain, and test communications infrastructure reliably isn’t there, and that the risk of depending on it is too high for safety-critical systems.
Reclaiming Governance
Most IT directors already know where the gaps are. The harder part is making them legible to leadership — translating "no local survivability" into a question the board can actually answer: what is our policy on communications availability when the network goes down?
That conversation starts with three things: a clear inventory of your current system's failure modes, an explicit survivability requirement that leadership has signed off on, and a commitment to test it. Not because boards need to become telecommunications experts, but because an untested resilience claim and an absent one are functionally the same thing.
Mitel works with K–12 districts and independent schools on communications architectures that meet explicit safety and survivability requirements, including hybrid deployments that maintain local operations during outages, managed services that don’t depend on stretched IT teams, and migration paths that don’t require replacing what’s already working.