Aldine ISD Gains Operational Clarity and Efficiency with Extreme Platform ONE

Aldine Independent School District sits in northern Harris County, Texas, serving communities across the booming Houston area. With more than 80 campuses, a 10,000 seat varsity football stadium, and 50,000+ students, the district operates a sprawling, distributed IT environment that includes thousands of access points and hundreds of switches.

With supporting learning a key priority, Aldine’s challenge of scale required clear visibility, fast troubleshooting, and a unified way for its networking and support team to work together. Together with Extreme Networks, Aldine’s team, led by Executive Director of Networking and Support, Michelle Okoro, set out to leverage AI and platformization to improve network visibility while accelerating the way they address issues and outages.

As Aldine’s network grew, working across multiple interfaces became unmanageable. The team lacked a single place where they could see the health of their switches, access points, and overall connectivity. This limited the ability of the network management team to proactively address issues.

Aldine’s overall challenges included:

• Limited visibility into campus-wide network health
• Slower, less coordinated troubleshooting among team members
• Time-consuming reporting to the CIO and leadership

Without a unified picture of the network, and the benefit of AI automation, the team was often bogged down with manual tasks, and the ability to deliver a consistent experience for teachers and students was becoming a challenge.

Aldine continues to adopt Extreme Platform ONE to pull its extensive network into one unified, cloud-based management. With one system for device configuration, monitoring, AI-powered troubleshooting, and analytics, the team has gained the end-to-end visibility they were missing.

For Aldine, Extreme Platform ONE delivers:

• Centralized cloud management for switches and access points, giving network staff a streamlined, flexible and comprehensive picture that covers the 80+ schools and shows direct readouts on the thousands of APs that power education and connect students and staff
• Agentic AI-powered networking helps automate critical device health and monitoring processes, allowing the team to proactively identify power, traffic, consumption and other issues before they impact classrooms and interrupt student learning
• Intuitive dashboards that give every engineer the same shared view, allowing the team to collaborate in real-time and resolve issues at faster speeds
• Streamlined, automated reporting that helped networking team members communicate effectively, and with clarity, while delivering the right information to district IT leadership

With Extreme Platform ONE, Aldine’s team looks forward to continuing to operate with greater clarity and efficiency. As an AI-powered networking solution, Extreme Platform ONE offers team members with varied levels of technical acumen the ability to extract critical business insights.

The most important changes that have taken place at Aldine:

• Aldine’s network team share a unified understanding of their network health, working “as one” to improve consistency across campuses and standardize their approach across the district.
• Aldine can deploy faster, more coordinated troubleshooting through AI Expert, which extends the network team’s ability to cover an expansive and ever-growing IT environment across the school districts buildings, classrooms, and venues, including Thorne Stadium.
• Better reporting to the CIO, providing leadership with concrete, actionable data and clear insights into trends across the network — allowing leadership to take more confident action on network challenges, security concerns, and developing situations.

With over 50,000 students to support, educate, and keep safe, Aldine was ready to make a network improvement that would empower the IT team to run an enterprise-level network across a large district. After turning to Extreme and trusting Extreme Platform ONE’s agentic AI capabilities, Aldine’s team has the power of simplicity, visibility, and automation at its fingertips.

Today, Aldine has a network environment that is easier to manage, faster to support, and better aligned with the demands of modern digital learning. And with the ability to scale into the future, the district will be well-positioned to keep student learning consistent and supported, whatever the next network challenge may be.