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Maximizing Budgets. Facilitating Learning.

 

Uniquely Difficult Challenges

Under public pressure to modernize their information and communication systems, schools face tremendous challenges few other public institutions must confront. School facilities are highly decentralized and may be spread out over wide areas. Because they are contracted along with the construction of individual buildings, school communications systems often consist of disparate, dated components, are supported by multiple sets of vendors, and offer limited capabilities. Additionally, schools are not always able to implement automated information systems nor extend them to the classroom. As a result, recordkeeping must be supplemented with manual paper processes. Monitoring and communications can’t be supported at all. High turnover in personnel requires many expensive adds/moves/changes to individual systems every year. This is stovepiping in the extreme. It creates extraordinary disadvantages as schools try to use technology to streamline operations and protect students.

 

Practical Solutions for Schools

The good news for schools is that the capabilities described in our example are available now. AAC provides school districts with a realistic strategy for achieving this level of performance. We help them maximize their budgets and actively enhance education by implementing improvements as a series of building blocks—first within schools and then between them. Project by project over time, we lay the foundation for operational effectiveness and security with our expertise in engineering IP networks. We build on that foundation with standards-based solutions for:

  • Unified communications
  • Enterprise infrastructure
We reinforce the foundation as needed with services for designing, building, operating, and managing networks:
  • Data
  • Voice
  • Video
  • Applications
  • Information Assurance/Security
  • Program Management
  • Process Management
  • Customer Support/Help Desk
  • Operations and Management

We ensure the quality and timely delivery of all these capabilities with ITIL, ISO 20000, and ISO 9001:2008-certified best practices and technical certifications from Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Citrix, VMware, the Computing Technology Industry Association (CTIA), and other organizations.

 

Real-World Knowledge Proven In Past Performance

AAC has over 25 years of experience serving school systems. This past performance means we understand not just technology, but how schools actually operate. Here are just a couple of cases that illustrate how we combine our technical capabilities with real-world knowledge to help our customers build toward highly effective performance:

 

Frederick County Public Schools, VA

In 2002, AAC designed and installed a unified communications system for the Frederick County Public Schools that replaced their various legacy PBX models and brands. The system included AAC’s PhoneTop® K-12 product which supplied teachers with the ability to use their IP phones to take student attendence and issue hall passes. In 2005 the schools implemented AAC’s popular PhoneTop Messenger solution which allows administrators to send text and audio pages to the phones. The text paging capability supplies the schools with a two-way, real-time communications medium that is less disruptive than using overhead audio paging. Today, five years later, Frederick County Public Schools is still realizing new benefits from the original system. AAC enhanced the Messenger product to include the ability for the system to track the presence of school faculty members as they use the phones to check in and check out each day.

 

Fauquier County Public Schools, VA

Like many school systems across the country, when a new school is built, the construction contractor includes the telephone system as part of the facility’s utility systems, like plumbing and electrical utilities. The result of this is that, over the years, each school is built by different contractors introducing different makes and models of telephone systems within the school system. The phone system, which provides voice communications services for the school system, is totally separate from the other communications systems (data, video, low-voltage PA, school bell, fire alarms, door alarms, etc.) and, as such, is separately budgeted, maintained and managed. Additionally, each different brand of legacy phone system (e.g., PBX) requires different talents to perform moves, adds, and changes (MACs) which are abundant in the school system given the amount of moving around done by faculty members each school year. Fauquier County Public Schools realized that they needed to make a change. AAC was brought in to help them understand the benefits of converging their voice and data networks onto a single communications infrastructure. AAC started with moving the school systems’ administration headquarters over to Cisco IP Telephony. Next, AAC added seamless, point to point video conferencing on top of this IP network. AAC then migrated Fauquier High School to VoIP and extended the county’s reach to two rural schools via wireless communications using Liberty High School as the hub for this wireless network into the converged voice and data network. This new unified communications network gives FCPS the ability to implement virtually unlimited services, including enhanced 9-1-1, web and audio meeting systems, digital media services for distance learning, and presence technologies, all augmented with high levels of security to protect student and other private information.