More K–12 Schools Adopt IP Phones for Flexibility and Savings

After an exhaustive search — including a six-month pilot of a solution that SCOE decided not to adopt — it turned out the answer was already in-house: Zoom, including Zoom Phone.

“People were already used to Zoom for conferencing, and though cost wasn’t the determining factor, using Zoom for phones too turned out to be a great deal,” Brooks says.

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VoIP Meets All of a California District’s Communication Needs

Adoption of cloud-based VoIP solutions, as well as unified communications and conferencing, continues to grow in K-12 education,  though more slowly than it did during the pandemic, explains Matthew Leger, senior research manager for IDC Government Insights, Worldwide Education and EdTech Digital Strategies.

“Many institutions were forced to move their communications solutions to the cloud to enable remote learning and distributed operations,” Leger explains. “Many schools and districts have stayed in the cloud since, while others continue to move their VoIP and unified communications capabilities to the cloud today as they look to offload as many workloads as they can.”

Some, like SCOE, have adopted a single cloud-based platform for all of their communication needs, including phones. Others have implemented phone systems and UC separately, in part because users tend to see them as different services and in part because of legacy systems.

“While VoIP and UC as a Service can be distinct, they often overlap,” Leger continues. “The choice depends on specific needs, existing infrastructure and budget constraints. And the integration issues may include compatibility with legacy systems, data migration challenges and ensuring a seamless user experience across platforms.”

With approximately 700 employees across dozens of sites, SCOE, which delivers supplementary education services to public school districts in Sacramento County, acquired nearly as many Zoom-compatible AudioCodes IP phones so most employees could have one.

“People tend to have emotional reactions to technology, like phones on their desks,” Brooks says.

READ MORE: See how these K–12 schools are using IT to boost the bottom line.

For his team, the phones are just network endpoints, and SCOE found the Zoom/AudioCodes combination easy to configure and manage. Firmware updates to the phones are done automatically, and users have found it easy, when necessary, to take their IP phone home, connect it to the internet and work as if they were in the office.

At the same time, Brooks says, staff have grown comfortable using Zoom’s softphone app, either on their smartphone or laptop, to make and receive calls at their SCOE extension.

“People still tend to use the phone and conferencing capabilities separately,” he says, “But phone conversations have gone down while conferencing, even with cameras turned off, has gone up.”

Heartland Area Schools Find Flexibility With Soft Phones

Heartland Area Education Agency, which supports more than 80 school districts and roughly 150,000 students in central Iowa, was in a situation similar to SCOE’s. As longtime Zoom users, the agency migrated to Zoom Phone for VoIP in 2020. But fewer than 1 in 7 of its almost 700 employees uses an agency-issued HP Poly IP phone — so that’s how many phones Heartland owns and manages.

Amy Wichman, Heartland’s director of media, technology and digital learning, recently turned her phone in. “You get so acclimated to not using a physical phone,” she says. “The culture has shifted.”

Many of Heartland’s staff members work outside the office, often directly with students and parents. Some were using their personal devices to call or message, which became a privacy concern for both parties. Zoom Phone offered the solution.

“Now, we communicate with parents from one Heartland phone number, and they can text. They can call, chat or leave a message at any time. It’s invaluable,” Wichman says.

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Employees use multifactor authentication to access Zoom’s services. Once online, the tools are intuitive.

“People are really familiar with Zoom — unfortunately, because of the pandemic — so onboarding is easy,” explains David Hammer, Heartland‘s multimedia specialist and Zoom administrator. “And from my perspective, the simplicity of making changes in the system from anywhere, like redirecting calls or recording outgoing messages during inclement weather, is one of the biggest benefits.”

Jeff Weinberg, Heartland’s director of technology infrastructure, says transitioning to a unified cloud platform for VoIP and UC has made the agency more agile and responsive to employees and the community. Communication preferences evolve, peak and ebb, Weinberg says.

“If calls are higher at certain times of the year, we can easily accommodate it. If they prefer to text or use video, we can communicate that way,” he says. “And with one platform, we can do it without jumping between tools.”

Guildford County Schools See Savings With VoIP

Still, for some districts, just getting all of their communication systems into the cloud is the key. While Guilford County Schools enjoys multiple cloud-based options for connecting staff and community, the North Carolina district’s primary videoconferencing platform is Microsoft Teams, and its new cloud-based VoIP solution is True IP with Yealink phones. The benefit of this more unified system? Sheer scale.

“If I didn’t have a physical IP phone on my desk, I’d be OK, but we’ve got 10,000 employees across 126 schools,” says Guildford CTO Rashad Slade, explaining that it was important to allow for different types of users.

While Slade understands the potential of combining platforms, as well as the tech teams that support each, he knows that doing so would take time. As it is, staff members instinctively know when communication requires a Teams conference and when it requires picking up a phone. “I haven’t heard staff say, ‘Hey, we need to pick one or the other,” he says.

The current solution has already been a boon to Slade’s team. The district has seen significant cost savings, which it can reallocate to pay for other learning tools. And being able to troubleshoot a phone system over the cloud, from a central location, has saved time and reduced vehicular carbon emissions.

“Most important,” Slade says, “communication has improved throughout the organization.”