December 2005 — Features

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VoIP to the Rescue

by Jacob Milner

“I had heard all of these great things about VoIP, but had never tried it for myself,” he says, looking back. “When it became clear to me that with minimal improvements to our infrastructure quality wouldn’t be an issue, I was ready to go for it.”

The conversion began in 2002 at a mothballed elementary school that the district refurbished and reopened to manage unexpected growth. Over the course of two weeks, SCS installed an IP telephony system from ShoreTel (www. shoretel.com) that consisted of a central call server and about 60 phones. After success with this first system, SCS installed another ShoreTel system in a second school. Then, over the course of the next 12 months, the integrator rolled out VoIP systems at 13 other schools and at the district’s transportation and maintenance locations, providing district technologists with training on how to support and maintain the system all the while.

This system combines IP telephony and traditional telephone lines, otherwise known as POTS (plain old telephone system) lines. While the system runs VoIP between switches, the connection from the switch to the phone remains analog. This setup enables DDSD to use existing analog phones, thereby keeping costs down. Additionally, the district kept its existing POTS numbers for inbound calling, which meant staff members and parents did not have to learn any new numbers. As Seher explains, these POTS lines also serve for backup outbound calling in the event of emergencies, if the IP system goes down, or if one particular location is disconnected from the core network.

On paper, the biggest benefit of the new system was cost savings. DDSD had been spending $75,000 a year for maintenance on its PBX system, while SCS agreed to support the new ShoreTel system for $30,000. In practice, however, the system transformed an even more important part of district life: the communication between parents and teachers. By the time the implementation was finished in 2004, DDSD had installed a VoIP phone in every classroom, providing teachers with features such as e-mail-based voicemail (instead of handwritten messages) and daily audio bulletins delivered by phone. At some schools, DDSD even has assigned teachers with their own fourdigit extensions.

“Whereas in the past teachers had to go to the office to make a call, now their extension follows them, and they can make calls from whatever classroom they use,” says Seher. “You can’t get more connected than that.”

Thinking Big
The local school board’s desire to put a phone in every classroom is what drove a broad-sweeping VoIP implementation in Nevada’s Clark County School District (CCSD), which encompasses the city of Las Vegas and all of its surrounding towns. Covering more than 300 schools and other educational facilities, the district has an enrollment that exceeds 295,000 students and employs nearly 30,000 teachers, administrators, and support personnel. In all, the district rolled out a wide area network (WAN) and a VoIP network with more than 22,000 phones. While the VoIP part of the implementation stands as one of the largest on record in K-12, it also has helped administrators save some serious cash along the way.