Head of the class: CIO Kevin Palmer employs value-added services to solve critical network problems for his growing Missouri school district

Communications News, Jan, 2004

When Kevin Palmer took over as chief information officer of Missouri's Francis Howell School District two years ago, he was confronted with a mixed bag of poorly operated networks and technologies. The sprawling school district's communications network was a jumble of obsolete electronics and non-standard cabling and wiring.

One of the largest public school districts in Missouri, Francis Howell School District has 26 school and administrative buildings serving 26,000 pre-kindergarten-12 students, and encompasses more than 150 square miles. An estimated 2,200 teachers and staff are employed through the school district's four high schools, five middle schools, 10 elementary schools, three early childhood centers and four administration/support buildings.

While the school district has regularly received top honors as a leader in innovative teaching programs and student test scores, its network technology was far from being an award-winner.

"The school district's communications network for voice and data systems would go down regularly," Palmer recalls. "Entire buildings would fall off line for several days at a time, and in some cases, for as long as a two-week stretch. The network equipment wasn't always interoperable, so it was difficult to maintain. It was a very difficult environment in which to work."

The district's new CIO knew that the classroom environment could not operate with the existing dysfunctional technology. Classes could not connect to the Internet with any reliability, so teachers chose not to use it. PCs would not work, or would break down for several days at a time. Teachers were steering away from using the technology that was in place.

At the administration level, Francis Howell had recurring problems getting data on attendance or student grades transferred to and from its main database in a timely manner. The end result: district staff either would not use the technology or failed to use it properly to capitalize on the efficiencies it had to offer.

CABLE PLANT A MESS

"Even with our Web pages, teachers started going off-site and working at home to update their Web pages, because to update them here required them to put their changes on a diskette, and send them through the interoffice mail to a Web person, who was then responsible for actually updating the pages," Palmer says. "We lost the immediacy of that whole technology--the ability to update content on demand."

"Most of the wiring was very poor," Palmer adds. "There were no standards applied. We had a real issue with Category 3 and Category 5 wire in the walls terminating incorrectly. No resting or documentation on the cable plant had been available to work from."

School district patrons and parents regularly questioned the networks integrity. The situation was so critical that Palmer did not have time to research what the technology issues were costing the school district. "We knew it had to be fixed immediately. If you can't depend on the foundational technology, then you have a huge cost or increase in expense through the manual systems being created."

Palmer's first step was to create a horizontal cable plant as a foundation for the new vertical applications the school district wanted. "That cable plant is the lifeline on which we depend."

Palmer's challenges, however, were large and resources limited. His staff was small. His department operated on a fixed budget that was closely supervised by the district superintendent, school board members, teaching staff, parents and the voters.

"It was a challenge at times," he offers. "Our local community is very involved in the education process and is supportive of proven solutions. The superintendent and the board really challenged me to make certain I had the best solution, the best price and the best partners."

Palmer turned to the value-added services provided by St. Louis-based Graybar, a provider of supply-chain management and logistics services, and a leading North American distributor of electrical, telecommunications and networking products.

"I needed expertise that could come in and independently and objectively tell me what we were doing right and what we could do better," Palmer says. "With Graybar, we were able to identify priorities very quickly and easily. Their network systems specialist analyzed our cabling plant and network electronics, providing information that I could use throughout the justification process."

INFRASTRUCTURE ANALYZED FIRST

With Graybar's team, Palmer and his staff analyzed each buildings infrastructure, inclusive of cabling, connectors, electronics, logical configurations and how the buildings were interconnected. Once the physical inspections were performed, they reviewed the results, prioritized the work and assessed the time needed to complete the work. The entire assessment process took about two weeks.

"With every building, Graybar prepared an organized 'hit list' of items and potential problem areas," Palmer explains. "What they also did was provide information on the manufacturers out in the field. We literally had every manufacturer you could think of for connectivity."