Mannford Public Schools went from completely unprotected to completely covered. No new hires required.

The Challenge

Bryan Golemon spent 10 years in Mannford Public Schools’ classrooms teaching geography, math, and social studies, coaching football, wrestling, track, and golf, before stepping into his current IT Director role. He was, by his own description, a fish out of water.

For years, computers around the district would lock up, and teachers would call it in like a fire drill: call Dell, wait through the flashing lights, calm everyone down. It happened once or twice a week. 

Bryan finally called the district’s recently retired IT Director and asked what they used for endpoint protection. She named a free consumer tool. Bryan pointed out it hadn’t been free for business use in some time. “Then we don’t use anything,” she told him. It had never crossed her mind. 

Mannford Public Schools’ servers were protected. The 220 endpoint devices staff and students relied on every day weren’t, and nobody had ever priced or evaluated a real replacement. Bryan took the gap to his superintendent, and they spent six months evaluating roughly five vendors before choosing ThreatDown. Every other option would’ve required Bryan to manage it himself. “I can’t be cybersecurity man and tech man and everything else,” he told his superintendent. With no team behind him, that wasn’t a real option. 

The Solution

When ThreatDown walked Bryan through the different coverage levels, the choice wasn’t hard. “Our elite level literally is a 24/7 backbone for you,” they told him. For a one-person IT department, that’s not a feature. It’s the whole value proposition. 

ThreatDown Elite MDR covers all 220 of Mannford Public Schools’ endpoints with 24/7 managed detection and response. It works like having coworkers Bryan never had to hire. The analysts handle detection, investigation, and response. Bryan gets a daily summary report, checks in once or twice a week, and can focus on his many other responsibilities. 

Before Bryan even purchased Elite MDR, results were already showing up during the trial period. Bryan was pulling his daily report and catching things in real time: walking up to a teacher’s desk, showing them their activity on screen, and telling them to stop clicking on things they didn’t recognize. “How do you know that?” they’d ask. That was the moment it clicked for him. 

With endpoints covered, email was the next frontier. Email Security arrived at exactly the right moment. Before it deployed, a student’s Chromebook was left logged in at home and connected to an unsecured network. Attackers compromised the account and used it to send a phishing email themed around a mission trip to every address in the district, close to 1,900 accounts spanning pre-K through the cafeteria staff. The email looked legitimate. People clicked it. 

Bryan spent four or five days, some of them 18 to 19 hours long, logging into individual accounts to delete the email one by one. ThreatDown was piloting Email Security at the time. Bryan brought it in immediately, ran a two-to-three-week trial, and added it permanently within weeks. His superintendent didn’t question the added cost. 

The Results

Since deploying Email Security, 80 to 85% of phishing emails no longer reach Mannford Public School employees’ inboxes at all. Bryan showed his superintendent the numbers — 150 quarantined emails in a single three-day stretch — and watched him shake his head in disbelief. In one case, Bryan found 29 phishing emails sitting untouched in a board member’s account that had never once been opened.

In Bryan’s entire time as a ThreatDown customer, there’s been one major incident: an old device nobody realized was still in use got hacked. It was the one machine not running ThreatDown. Bryan immediately noticed there was no icon in the corner. It made sense. 

Support has been minimal by design. Bryan has called 3 times in 3 years: twice for email setup help, and once to clear a false positive on a Spanish class program pulling files from a Mexican university. Each time, the response was prompt and the issue was resolved. “You guys did what you were supposed to do,” he says. In this business, that’s the best thing a customer can say. 

When other schools ask Bryan what he’s doing for security now, his answer is immediate: ThreatDown.

“We won’t ever have to get a hold of ThreatDown,” he tells other schools, “because they’ll do it all for you.”