Network management in K–12 districts can be tedious and labor-intensive. Legacy equipment often requires manual setup and maintenance, straining the capacity of thin-stretched IT teams. At Prosper Independent School District in Texas, technology leaders realized they needed a better approach.
The district currently has 32,000 users on the network, and 10,000 new students are expected in the next few years, according to Curtis Henderson, Prosper ISD’s director of technology network services.
“We had a controller architecture that was failing us, and we were having wireless outages at multiple campuses during the day,” he says. “That’s what started us questioning whether we were doing the right thing or whether we needed to go out and find something better that could scale with us as we continue to grow.”
The district recently deployed Juniper Networks’ Mist AI, which is an AI-native networking platform. In Prosper and other districts nationwide, IT leaders have found that AI-informed networking systems can simplify operations, improve productivity and deliver reliable performance at scale.
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AI Automatically Resolves Networking Issues
Prosper deployed Juniper Networks’ Mist AI, and CTO Fernando De Velasco describes seeing it in action for the first time:
“On the first day, I was attending the demo. We’re looking at one of our schools, and in the middle of the console there is a red dot. You click on it, and it takes you to the school. In one of the rooms, there is a red dot. Click again, and you find yourself visualizing the statistics on one specific access point in one classroom — It’s just three clicks to drill down all the way from a district view into a classroom, and it tells me, ‘You have a problem, you need to come and take care of it.’”
At Aldine ISD, CIO Adam Galván likewise led a network upgrade that included Extreme Networks’ 6 gigahertz Wi-Fi technology and Extreme Cloud IQ. “The previous wireless system was experiencing a lot of issues because the equipment was out of warranty and had reached its end of life,” he says.
With the AI-informed solution, issues get resolved with minimal IT intervention. “It’s like an engineer in the cloud, where it’s already working and trying to fix the issues,” he says. “We see faster speeds and lower latency.”
The upgrade enables the district to deliver connectivity seamlessly for one-to-one computing. “To handle 9,000 devices, we wanted to make sure the technology was smart enough to adjust when it saw issues: shut down an access point when there was interference, look for those rogue APs that may be showing up,” he says. The Extreme solution delivers all of this.
AI-Enabled Networking Provides Support for Learning Technologies
At a high level, AI-enabled networking promises to advance digital equity, says Emily DeJeu, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business whose work focuses on uses of AI in communication and education.
“Potentially, you can have a small, lean, agile IT team, and this is going to prevent the clunky manual efforts,” she says. “This could be a move toward greater equity for rural districts or underfunded districts that can’t pay for a big IT team. The potential there is exciting.”
At the classroom level, AI-informed networks enable a range of new and emerging learning technologies. For example, Aldine ISD allows for 4K video streaming and real-time student collaboration, and Galván says download speeds have more than quadrupled in some locations.
The new networking solution also supports the district’s need to have teachers literally be in two places at once.
“We don’t have enough teachers, so in some classrooms, a teacher is able to teach remotely,” he says. “With our old access points, we had to connect the interactive panel and wire it to the network, just to get that connection. Now we can set up the interactive panel anywhere, and we don’t have any dropped packets or any slow connections.”
The network also supports the district’s use of Amira AI, a personalized reading tutor that students can access via their Chromebooks. “Before we upgraded our APs, students would frequently get disconnected,” he says. “Now, with the new wireless access points, students can stay connected online to access the software.”
In California, Moreno Valley Unified School District has upgraded to an AI-enabled networking solution from HPE Aruba — HPE Aruba Networking Central — aiming in part to support advanced learning technologies.
It connects tablets and laptops, and teachers can take lessons outdoors, while maintaining access to all of their digital resources. Moreover, the network empowers advanced computer-aided design classes, Internet of Things–enabled makerspaces and 3D printers with embedded cameras, so that students and teachers can see projects in progress.
At Prosper ISD, meanwhile, AI-informed networking delivers the capacity needed to ensure every student can connect — and Henderson says that’s just the start.
“We have a one-to-one initiative for secondary students, where every student has a Chromebook, and every elementary classroom has a Chromebook cart. We see, on average, 45,000 wireless clients connected each day,” he says. “The network is the foundation of what everybody’s doing. We’re building the infrastructure for them to do anything they want to do.”
AI-Enabled Networking Leads to Simpler Operations
For IT teams, AI-enabled networking simplifies and streamlines network management.
“With the AI, the team can ask questions: ‘What’s going on? What’s the issue?’ And they can let it know, ‘Hey, address this update to each of the access points.’ And it’s done, quickly,” Galván says.
Prosper ISD’s IT team can build in metrics that they expect to see in their environment, and if performance dips below those thresholds, they are alerted to the anomaly.
“The performance that we see with Juniper has been transformative. We’re no longer waiting for a teacher to put a ticket in to tell us that we have a problem. We’re seeing that there’s a problem before the teacher sees it, and then we can address it,” Henderson says. “And we’re ensuring that classroom instruction time is not impacted.”
Looking ahead, the district plans to keep abreast of emerging network management capabilities.
“We’re always trying to make sure that we’re up to date on the new wireless standards. We’re Wi-Fi 6/6E, pushing the boundaries to get to Wi-Fi 7 and hoping to start using 6GHz channels as fast as we can,” Henderson says. “We try our best with the funds that we have available to ensure that we’re providing the best network that we can for our staff and students.”
