School district retools its LAN: Access to media encourages advanced learning for K-12 students - Special Focus: Local Area Networks - San Felipe Del Rio Consolidated Independent School District

Communications News, Jan, 2002

Located along Texas' border with Mexico, San Felipe Del Rio Consolidated Independent School District (SFDR) could hardly boast the bleeding-edge technology that might rival Fortune 500 companies. In fact, communicating among its 25 K-12 administrative and educational campuses was a challenge, at best.

The school district had other problems, as well. Costs for more than 800 POTS telephone lines were excessive and offered few features. Teachers lacked time and money to travel to conferences. Most classrooms did not have access to the network or the Internet. Most important, students did not have access to media that encouraged more advanced learning.

"Our original network infrastructure was very unreliable," says Donnie Weaver, technology director for SFDR. "Some areas weren't cabled at all, and other areas that were cabled weren't working properly. It was a big mess."

After six months and two demos, SFDR staff found a solution in Cisco's Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data (AVVID). In order to support the solution, however, a complete WAN/ LAN infrastructure needed to be implemented, which would cost $4.8 million. A grant seemed the easiest and quickest way to raise funds for the project.

Avnet Enterprise Solutions (www.es.avnet. com)--an IT infrastructure architect--which had assisted the district in identifying the Cisco solution, again stepped in to offer assistance on both pulling together the grant application and designing the network.

After securing the grant, Avnet started work on the WAN/LAN infrastructure, which used Avaya's outdoor ODP 50 Micron Fiber Optic Lazer Speed Cable. The new infrastructure also included 24 Cisco Catalyst 6500 series switches and nearly 200 Cisco Catalyst 3500 series switches, interconnected via redundant gigabit fiber links and more than a hundred virtual LANs. Avnet also replaced the network operations center with a Windows 2000 server farm containing 10 Dell Quad Xeon processor PowerEdge servers and its Fibre Channel storage area network.

Because SFDR could not afford any downtime once school was in session, the district maintained two networks during the installation of the network cabling and equipment, making the final switchover during a weeklong spring break.

"At that point, we had our server farm, mail server and domain up and running. We were ready to transition everyone to the new network," says Weaver.

The second phase consisted of implementing the rest of the AVVID solution, which allowed staff members to interconnect all systems to one infrastructure. Because staff members could already show a substantial cost reduction--the cost of videos, teacher training and travel--the school board approved the $1.8 million price tag for this phase from out of the local budget.

The entire project went live last fall. "Before, we had over 800 telephone lines paying approximately $200,000 per year to the local telco," says Weaver. "Now, we have three T-1-PRI lines providing 36 outside lines to our approximately 1,200 IP telephones. We eliminated a huge cost."

"Every classroom has Internet access, every teacher has an e-mail account and a telephone with voice mail," says Weaver. "This has really increased teacher-parent communication."

Staff members and educators can use the system for videoconferencing, staff development training and student education.

"Once, we needed to maintain a large library of videotapes," says Weaver. "Today, our videos can be digitized and stored on the server for everyone to view at the click of a mouse. Instead of a teacher having to make arrangements for a VCR and TV to view videos in the classroom, the teacher can simply browse the video collection online."

A plus from an administrative point of view: Teachers can input daily attendance and grades on the network, so staff members can have immediate access to those records. "We now provide a greater range of technology and services to our teachers and staff that will provide a positive impact on our students," says Weaver.

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