Decatur City Schools improves student engagement with new Aruba Wi-Fi and wired solutions to achieve excellence goals
USE CASE:Improve educational outcomes by boosting student engagement using high-performance, reliable and easily deployed Wi-Fi and wired infrastructure, with AI and cloud-based management saving time and budget.
Establishing a 100-percent college and career initiative launched a multifaceted teaching and learning transformation at Decatur City Schools in Alabama. The effort quickly led officials to determine the district’s existing wired and wireless environment couldn’t cope with the new demands.
“Our decade-old legacy infrastructure was increasingly lacking in performance,” explains Emily Elam, Supervisor of Technology for the 8700-student district. “In addition to our existing 1:1 initiative in 4th-8th grade, we also planned to supply every 9th-12th grader with a Chromebook at our two new high schools. With the growing demands and device densities, we clearly needed an infrastructure refresh.”
Positive Experiences Lead to Aruba Embrace
To begin, Decatur evaluated whether to update its existing solution or seek another option. Elam’s familiarity with Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, from her previous district tipped the scales.
We’re definitely realizing value from modernizing our wired and Wi-Fi infrastructure. We credit Aruba with being an exceptional partner in making it happen.艾米丽·埃拉姆（Emily Elam），Supervisor of Technology, Decatur City Schools
“I had a great experience with HP at my prior district, where there were very few issues with the networking equipment and the warranty meant no costly repairs,” Elam says. “This made Aruba ownership a very cost-effective way to be good stewards of taxpayer funds. We also used Aruba ClearPass for policy-based access control and our experience with it was equally positive.”
尽管Elam对Aruba充满信心，但Decatur的网络管理员最初对现任人进行了大量投资。“幸运的是，他对阿鲁巴的产品质量，直观的界面，易于配置和广泛的支持资源的了解越多，他对取得飞跃感到兴奋。”“我们再也没有回头。”
Aruba Infrastructure + Central = Long-Term Connectivity Gains
与Aruba代表合作，Decatur开始了多年更新，以与E-Rate赠款的可用性一致。这包括以即时模式（IAP）（IAP）以及基于云的Aruba Central以及用于网络管理和操作的高性能Aruba访问点以及访问开关。
“In addition to addressing our short-term needs, the set-up provides the flexibility to evolve our network over time,” says Elam. “Aruba’s demonstrated track record for supplying efficient and effective pathways for smoothly transitioning to the latest technologies, as they’re required, is a big plus.”
The district also deployed Aruba’s mobility controllers to create a guest network via VPN tunneling back to the data center. “Our teachers and staff need access to their mobile phones for various reasons, particularly in case of an emergency,” Elam says. “Combining our IAPs with a VPN enables us to offer connectivity for those BYOD devices.”
Aruba Central reduces networking complexity and costs
Given Decatur’s ultra-lean IT staff, officials were especially attracted to Aruba Central’s breadth of features and cost efficiencies.
“Among its advantages, Aruba Central eliminated the need for an on-site server and associated costs,” says Elam. “This also avoided inherent server administration and update tasks, which helps relieve an already challenging goal to keep up with all of our technology needs and requests.”
从节省成本到生产力
What’s more, Central supplies a wealth of other attributes. “For instance, with our old system, configuring and updating network settings was cumbersome,” says Gary Cloer, Network Administrator at Decatur. “Central not only simplifies those processes, it’s also easy and intuitive to use.”
非破坏性微调是另一个功能克洛尔值。克洛尔说：“以前，由于我们的旧系统过于复杂，需要将网络配置更新几个小时，因此需要脱机。”“使用中央，进行需要的更改需要几秒钟。”
Overall, Cloer appreciates the concise view of each IAP, how they are performing and the clients connected to them. “This gives us visibility into whether any adjustments are needed as utilization patterns change,” he says. “Having such a powerful and intuitive tool frees my time to focus on other critical projects.”
Switching Innovations Future-Proof Wired Investments
On the wired side, Aruba’s switches are answering multiple near and long-term needs. “For example, we purchased some of our switches with general fund resources to enable deploying a variety of IoT systems,” says Elam.
This enables Decatur to run current IoT solutions, such as security cameras, door locks, intercoms and telephony, over the wired network without any congestion, she says. Further, Decatur’s wired network is now future-proofed to support new requirements as they emerge.
“Aruba’s high-powered PoE switch ports and multi-gigabit Ethernet capabilities provide us with the features we need today,” she explains. “In the future, we can easily take advantage of the many capabilities Aruba is building into its access switches.”
Aruba Clearpass– Unified Wired and Wi-Fi policies
Decatur还可以通过部署ClearPass来预测统一Wi-Fi和有线访问的奖励。这将为该地区提供一种旨在对学生，老师，员工和客人进行身份验证的系统，节省时间并满足安全需求。
“We appreciate the granular visibility and enhanced security ClearPass will give us with respect to who and what is connecting to our network,” says Elam. “We’ll also have improved control over bandwidth utilization, which is particularly critical to managing guest and Internet traffic effectively.”
Putting colorless ports and dynamic segmentation to work
Other projects on the horizon include leveraging the colorless port and Dynamic Segmentation capabilities within Aruba’s switches.
The former enables a switch port to automatically use information, supplied from ClearPass, about a connected device to determine whether it’s a camera or an HVAC sensor for automatically assigning appropriate access rights. This eliminates manual port configuration tasks.
同样，动态分割利用了使用区定义的规则将Clearpass clearpass向微段流量，以增加数据安全性，因为信息在网络上传播。
Enabling New Offerings while Exceeding Exceptions and Goals
With its new network providing a modern infrastructure foundation, the benefits at Decatur rapidly added up. “When you open two new schools, with new equipment and new Chromebooks for each of about 2500 student, expectations run high,” says Elam.
“All of the cloud applications at our high schools – Google Classroom, Canvas learning management and online textbooks – depend on a reliable experience,” she continues. “Our new wired and wireless infrastructure is enabling us to exceed our students, teachers and staff expectations.”
Esports team takes the lead
In addition to powering classroom systems, high-performance Wi-Fi is opening doors to new options for engaging students. One of them is supporting an Esports team, complete with college scholarship opportunities.
“The State of Alabama sanctions three Esports games, of which we participate in League of Legends,” Elam says. “The bandwidth and performance requirements are very high, and it must be stable, as higher education scholarships are on the line. Our Aruba Wi-Fi gives us the confidence to encourage our students to participate and win.”
Academic outcomes abound
最重要的是,以拦报道,迪凯特苏尔passing its excellence goals. Two significant measures are reduced absenteeism and higher graduation rates.
“By enhancing student engagement we hoped to see a three percent decline in absenteeism,” she says. “Instead, absenteeism dropped by 14 percent, which is tremendous.”
对于毕业率，目标增加了2％。埃拉姆说：“我们也有望超越该目标。”“我们对我们的动力有多远感到非常满意，尤其是考虑到我们地区受到挑战的人口统计。”
“We’re definitely realizing the value from modernizing our infrastructure,” she adds. “We credit Aruba with being an exceptional partner in making it happen.”
