Adding Access Points Helps Support Demand
Santa Maria Joint Union High School District in California faced a similar situation. With networking equipment that was nearly 10 years old, “we were seeing issues almost on a daily basis,” says Director of Instructional Technology Matt Stockton. “We started to see the traffic overwhelm our network.”
During the pandemic, the Canvas learning management system became the hub of teaching and learning for about 9,000 students and 1,000 staffers. Today, “kids are utilizing Canvas and some of our other instructional tools every single class period,” he says. Add to this students’ cellphones and other personal devices, and the network starts to groan.
“We would see 70 devices on an access point that was originally designed to support 40,” he says. “We had a lot of kids timing out, and teachers were getting extremely frustrated with it.”
As Marassa started laying plans for an upgrade at New Trier, he knew he needed outside help. “As a CTO, I have to manage so many ecosystems, and I don't have staff that are experts in these silos. They have to wear a lot of hats,” he says. He turned to CDW for expert guidance. “They were instrumental in educating me and my team on where wireless technology was at, and what the infrastructure requirements were going to be.”
He says it was important to work with a vendor-agnostic partner. “I did not come in with a mindset of, ‘Cisco is our choice.’ When you talk to CDW, they explain to you the whole breadth of technology partners and solutions that are in this space,” he says.
“It’s very helpful to have a partner like CDW that can come in and teach us,” he says. “They give you honest feedback on what’s going on in the field, what solutions are working well, what solutions are good long-term investments.”
These conversations helped Marassa to decide on Cisco Meraki access points, supported by Cisco 9300 switches, which he knew were necessary to get maximum value out of the new APs. “We needed to make sure that we bought switches that could push 5 gigs per port,” he says.
Modernization Expands the Network Footprint
At Santa Maria, Stockton took a two-step approach, with separate projects to put in place new switches and APs from Extreme Networks. “There were close to 700 switches throughout the district,” he says. “And then, there were about 800 access points.”
In addition to upgrading connectivity in classrooms, he took the opportunity to expand the Wi-Fi footprint into outdoor spaces.
“Kids in the quad area were trying to pull a signal from a nearby classroom AP and then overwhelming it because there were also 30 kids in that room,” he says.
By adding outdoor connectivity in addition to replacing all the indoor APs, “we wanted to saturate the campuses with the ability to connect,” he says.
Experts say such network modernization efforts are mission critical in the modern K–12 environment. “High speed, low latency and secure connectivity ensures uninterrupted learning,” says CoSN CEO Keith Krueger.
“Robust, upgraded networks also give districts the stability and protection needed to implement strong security controls, content filtering and data protection safeguards that keep students, staff and systems safe,” he says.
At New Trier, the modernization effort has put the district in a safer place going forward. “That investment has created a robust infrastructure for at least 10 years, if not longer,” Marassa says. For example, the network will be able to support the next generation of Wi-Fi 6-enabled devices as they become available.
In the meantime, the upgrades have closed connectivity gaps. “We’re getting faster bandwidth on a wireless laptop than if it was hardwired to the desk,” he says. “We’re getting between 1.3 megabytes to 1.7 MB of throughput, more than you typically would get if you were hardwired.”
That has allowed the district to do standardized testing without any worries, he says. And the improved connectivity has elevated what teachers are able to do.
Teachers in the district move between classrooms, and this proved a limitation on the older network equipment. Without the certainty of having connectivity in the older rooms, some teachers would avoid incorporating technology into their plans “because they wanted to use the same lesson plan in both the modern and older classroom spaces,” he says. With a more reliable network, “teachers can start to plan lessons in all of their classes, and they don’t have to worry that the technology is not going to work.”
