As the superintendent of the Katy Independent School District in metropolitan Houston, Leonard Merrell knows a thing or two about growing pains.

Reportedly the fastest-growing district in all of Texas, Katy adds an additional 3,000 students every school year.

The growth has come with its share of complications, says Merrell. Three years ago, the district's technology infrastructure was near collapse. As new students and families continued pouring into the community year after year, district administrators and teachers struggled to keep the network up to speed. They sought to ensure that technology components--from basic classroom computers to complex back-office systems used to manage transportation and food service--were capable of meeting the needs of a growing population.

Not unlike other suburban school districts across the country struggling to cope with the challenges presented by exploding enrollments, Katy ISD began looking for ways to protect its multimillion-dollar technology infrastructure, including thousands of classroom computers and high-powered data servers, from the potentially crippling effects of urban sprawl.

Hoping to add a touch of corporate efficiency to the district's overmatched IT department, Merrell took an unorthodox approach. Rather than try and grow the network under its current regime, he hired a pair of private-sector executives to overhaul the entire infrastructure.

"We all had an idea of where we wanted technology to go ... but needed someone who could translate that vision into a reality," said Merrell.

The search eventually led the district to Scott Wright, a former executive and technology consultant who had spent the majority of his career working in the oil and gas industries. Merrell invited Wright and members of his independent consulting firm, Xpediant, to the district. Their charge: to stabilize Katy's overburdened IT infrastructure and improve the quality of its back-end operations.

"When I first came here, Katy really was in kind of a crunch [from] systems just not performing like they should," said Wright, who--despite being paid as an independent contractor--was given the title of executive director of technology for the district. Katy "was having problems keeping the infrastructure going," he said.

Three years and several sweeping reforms later, Wright says Katy's once-maligned infrastructure now adequately services some 48,000 students and 4,000 full- and part-time instructors--all with an approval rating that reportedly tops 90 percent of school district employees.

In an interview with eSchool News, the pioneers behind the district's high-tech turnaround talked about what it took to transform Katy from a limited technology district into a massive, enterprise-level infrastructure.

This is their story.

Culture shock

Before he arrived in Katy, Wright said, the district's IT department was in disarray, organized under a hierarchy that made it difficult to discern between the educators who specialized in leveraging technology in the classroom and the professional technologists whose primary job was to maintain the network and ensure the systems were up and running.