School District Gets Lesson In IP Telephony

In the middle of a $150 million renovation and expansion of its two high schools and administration building, the district had to decide whether to go with an expanded PBX system or move to IP telephony.

"IP telephony was moving from bleeding edge to cutting edge," said Guy

Ballard, director of technology for the district, which serves 5,000 students in Chicago's northern suburbs. "We outsourced maintenance and moves, adds and changes, so [the legacy PBX system was very expensive."

After examining the options, the school district teamed with Sentinel Technologies, a Downers Grove, Ill.-based Cisco Systems solution provider, to implement Cisco's IP telephony system.

The Niles Township district now runs a Cisco AVVID network supporting about 650 IP phones spread across its three locations. Sentinel added Cisco Call Managers to the district's existing network, Quality of Service-enabled the network for voice, and trained school staff to do the actual rollout of the phones, said Robert Keblusek, vice president of business development at Sentinel.

The locations are connected via a fiber metropolitan area network with backup T1 connections between sites. "We added that to their [request for proposal, and it had a lot to do with us getting the job," Keblusek said. If anything should happen to a fiber connection, the system would automatically reroute network traffic, including voice, over the T1 connection, he said. With service providers offering special pricing on T1 lines for the education market, the backup connections were an easy sell, he added.

And they have already been put to the test. Sentinel outfitted the administration offices last spring and the schools over the summer. As luck would have it, a truck severed one of the district's fiber lines on the first day of school, Ballard said. The system switched to backup without a hitch, he said.

Another big sales factor were the LCD screens on Cisco's IP phones. Using an XML-based application designed by Sentinel, called I.Q. for Education, the school district disseminates daily lunch menus and school bulletins via the phones' screens, Ballard said.

Sentinel's I.Q. for Education solution allows schools to take attendance, track student and teacher schedules, access contact information and send informational bulletins through the browser on Cisco's IP phones, Keblusek said.

Ballard said the school district wanted to deliver information without putting a PC on every desk. "I took quite a bit of heat when I first proposed this system," he said. "Everybody said these are just fancy phones. But now that they have these phones on their desks with access to information, they agree with me."

Sentinel and the Niles Township district, which has its own Web development team, also produced an application that taps into proprietary district databases to enable teachers and administrators to access student and teacher schedules through the browser on the IP phones. They also are developing applications that will allow teachers to take attendance and enter grades through the phones' browser.

"We implemented our solution, but they are developing applications of their own to put on top of that," Keblusek said.

That's the main reason the school district chose Sentinel, Ballard said. "What Sentinel did for us that was unique is they formed a true partnership with us," he said. "They trained our staff and shared the code with us to allow us to develop our own customer applications."