No-Nonsense Networking Connecting dozens of schools in a high-speed network while on a budget is no small feat. The key to By Christopher Null July 2006

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When Philip Brody arrived at Clark County (Nev.) School District in September of 1998, he was charged with upgrading the district's computer network so schools could become competitive in the newly dawned Internet age.

The only problem, Brody noticed, is that there was no network. Nothing to speak of, anyway. Says Brody, "Some schools had dialup access. Some had ISDN. Some had T1s. And some had no connectivity. And there was no plan on how to deal with any of it."

Problems like Brody's plague school districts today, which are inevitably coping with the challenges of networking their schools together so they can purchase connectivity as a group, share resources and offer up-to-date services to their students. And of course it all has to be done for a reasonable cost.

Districts have come up with a variety of solutions to the networking problem, and today there are a few common methods of dealing with the challenge. Brody's district is a perfect case in point.

As the fifth-largest school district in America, Clark County comprises 317 schools (and counting), nearly 300,000 students and a land area the size of New Jersey. Some schools are separated by up to 90 miles. And growth has been explosive: Beginning in the early '00s, Clark County was opening one new school every month, a pace that has remained at this breakneck rate for more than five years.

As his first order of business, Brody decided he needed to at least get the schools a base level of connectivity. He knew that whatever the district decided to do for the long term, the necessary upgrades would take years to complete. Better to give everyone a base level of access immediately than force the unconnected schools to wait for the ultimate system to be installed.

For the short term, Brody connected all the schools directly to the Internet via a frame relay system from Sprint. The advantage of this system was that the company could completely handle the installation and management without intervention from Clark County. While the price was more than Brody would like to have paid, and this system didn't allow for any central oversight over internetworking among the various schools in the district, it did at least give the schools a reliable and reasonably fast connection to the Internet for basic Web browsing and e-mail.

But the Clark County plan was much larger than this. Enter Carlos A. Garcia, who was superintendent of district until late last year. (He is now vice president of urban markets for McGraw-Hill Education.) Garcia took the reins at Clark County in 2000 and spent his early months visiting classrooms and assuaging the technology situation. He was shocked to find many schools without computers. In schools with computers, several were still clinging to mainframe technology that was 20 or 30 years out of date-and employees didn't want to let that go.

Together with Brody, Garcia embarked on what might be the most ambitious network upgrade in the history of public K-12 schools. Their overarching goals: consider the long term and find ways to leverage the technology to save money. For example, Garcia wanted a telephone in every classroom and Brody wanted to ensure the schools had enough bandwidth. "Bandwidth was king," he explains. "You could never have enough. Adding bandwidth is expensive and time consuming, and we wanted to get ahead of the curve so we didn't have to play the bandwidth game every year or two."

In order to ensure that bandwidth level was high enough, Brody planned for a network that would support the school district for up to 10 years.

In a network project this large, the first step is to craft an RFP. Brody and Garcia enlisted the help of PriceWaterhouse and engineering firm SAIC to help them determine their exact technological needs and to generate a plan. Garcia is candid about their ignorance of cutting-edge technology, saying, "We knew we didn't have the expertise to write the RFP. We didn't even have the expertise to know what questions to ask."

According to Garcia, the biggest hurdle is making sure you partner with good technology providers. "A lot of people and vendors say they can do a lot of things, but we knew that some people would over-promise and realized that no matter who we hired, there were going to be a lot of bumps in the road." From his experience, Garcia learned that it's vital to be patient and take the time to vet the vendors and develop partnerships with people you want to work with. That way, they'll be upfront and honest about the obstacles, training and the amount of work the project will take.

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