Case Study
Superior Technology, Phenomenal Service: Outsourcing IT in Sheridan
When its IT director retired, this northern Wyoming district replaced its in-house IT department with a partner — and started spending less, with a 10-year sustainability plan guiding every purchase.
Sheridan County School District #1 sits in northern Wyoming, near the Bighorn Mountains: eight schools, more than 1,100 students, and roughly 160 staff, spread across a county where the nearest alternative to doing it yourself is a long drive away. What the district wanted was not the newest equipment. It was consistency — one standard across every building, one number to call, and someone who could say what the technology would cost three years out.
In 2016 the district's IT director retired, and the arrangement that had been quietly holding technology together retired with him. What remained was an unorganized mix: some work handled by internal staff, the rest handed off to a large outside vendor. Technology died without warning. Support was slow. Nobody was certain who owned a ticket once it was filed. There was no technology plan, and costs kept climbing anyway.
That left the district with a choice familiar to every rural administrator: recruit, hire, and train a new IT director in a tight labor market, or find a partner who could take the whole function. The district chose to outsource it completely.
Pine Cove started with an audit of every system, then built a 10-year sustainability and budgeting plan so equipment is scheduled and funded before it fails instead of replaced in a panic after. A full-time Pine Cove staff member works from the district as its day-to-day point of contact, backed by the full remote team of specialists, with Pine Cove running networking, cybersecurity, and support.
"Pine Cove removed a lot of constant headaches for us," says Superintendent Pete Kilbride. "The responsiveness and the level of service we get is phenomenal." Business manager Jeremy Smith measures the other scorecard: "We still spend less now with Pine Cove than we did when we hosted our own staff, and our technology is more up to date and better connected."
The district now runs one of the most technologically advanced environments of any district in Wyoming, staffed by a partner rather than a payroll line — and the budget went the direction budgets almost never go after an upgrade of this size: down.
