I have been doing this since 2001, and I have done it in a lot of rooms. A school district to start. IBM as a senior engineer. Network and systems work in healthcare, banking, tech, higher education. People assume the enterprise jobs were the hard ones and that schools must be a step down in difficulty. It is the opposite, in the ways that count.
In enterprise, when something is important, it usually gets resourced. There is a budget, there is a team, there is a vendor on contract, and when a system matters enough, the money to support it tends to show up. The constraints are real but they are mostly technical. In K-12, the constraints are everything at once. The expectations are nearly the same as enterprise, the data is just as sensitive, the threats are just as real, and you are doing it with a fraction of the staff and a budget that shrinks while the work grows. You are also doing it in public, in front of a board and sometimes a community vote.
What schools taught me that enterprise never did is how to make hard tradeoffs out in the open with almost nothing, and still be accountable for outcomes that genuinely matter. Nobody at a bank is going to remember a rough quarter the way a teacher remembers the year the devices did not work. The stakes feel more human. The people you support are educating kids, and you are part of whether they can.
That is why I came back to schools and stayed, and why I build for them now. The enterprise jobs taught me how the technology works. K-12 taught me what it is for.