Sejong Academy

The Situation

Sejong Academy had one in-house IT person. He ran everything alone, and he’d been running it his way for a long time.

His way was expensive. The school was paying $8,000 a year in licensing for a firewall. The IT closet had fifteen network switches in a building that needed three. Cable runs went to the highest-priced vendor in the region. Software licenses piled up for tools nobody used. He had told leadership directly that he treated the school as a personal tech playground.

His way was also controlling. He set every staff password himself and wouldn’t let people change them. Teachers were locked out of their own machines regularly because the passwords he assigned were impossible to remember.

Brad wasn’t sure outsourcing was the answer. Sejong had always relied on an in-house employee, and he worried that contracting out would mean losing immediate help. But the current arrangement wasn’t sustainable — and in August 2023, Sejong reached out to Umbrella through a referral.

What We Did

The first week we interviewed every staff member and walked the full infrastructure. The outgoing tech provided almost nothing useful for the handoff, so we reverse-engineered the environment — mapping switches, access points, cameras, and every system he’d wired in, rebuilding documentation from scratch.

The firewall went first. Sejong was paying $8,000 a year in recurring licensing. We replaced it after hours with a UniFi Dream Machine — a one-time $500 purchase, no annual fee.

Then we cleaned house. We pulled every vendor contract and canceled roughly 80% — software the school wasn’t using, services we could cover directly, subscriptions auto-renewing for years. We installed device management across the fleet, standardized password policy, gave staff control of their own accounts, and did a deep clean of the IT closet.

We didn’t overhaul the network in year one. School had already started, the existing system functioned, and the right call was to stabilize, cut the waste, and wait for summer.

In year two, Sejong moved buildings. We became their moving company. Over the summer we rebuilt the entire network at the new facility on UniFi — wired backbone, wireless, and a new camera system. We filed E-Rate on the infrastructure and the internet service, and a significant portion of the move was funded through the program. We cut their monthly internet bill in half. From Sejong’s perspective, they left one building on a Friday and walked into a new one on Monday where the Wi-Fi worked, their passwords worked, and every device connected the same way it had before.

What It Looks Like Now

Jesse is on-site two mornings a week. He handles tickets in person, sits with staff, and manages the network directly. Sejong runs roughly 60 staff devices and one device per student — iPads in lower grades, Chromebooks in upper grades. Average first response on tickets is one hour.

New technology rollouts that used to be stressful now happen cleanly. The school has a new director now, Hunseok Oh, and the relationship has continued. Umbrella is less expensive than the in-house arrangement that preceded us — and after the E-Rate reimbursements on the move, meaningfully less.