The Upper St. Clair School District, located just outside Pittsburgh, is one of a handful in Pennsylvania that are part of the International Baccalaureate program. The school system serves about 4,100 students with its 6 schools and 600 teachers and staff. It is among the top three school districts in the state, with 96% Upper St. Clair High School graduates moving on to higher education programs.
In addition to its six schools, the school district also maintains a central office and bus garage, all of which need to be connected by a single network. When the district first installed Wi-Fi across its facilities in the early 2000s, it was running a Cisco environment, which wasn’t a satisfactory solution because of co-channel interference and other challenges engineers and support teams weren’t able to reconcile.
With eight buildings, more than 150 applications and systems, and students and staff – each with multiple connected devices to support – the district needed to be confident its network could accommodate both current needs and future expansion without having to troubleshoot every day. The district was already working closely with its IT partner Cerdant, and was very happy with its services and top-notch support. When the district learned Cerdant had partnered with Extreme Networks, it quickly chose Extreme to support its new network. All eight of the district’s buildings are now running on Extreme solutions, with additional plans to support further network expansion.
“I’m looking at my network monitoring screen right now and we just peaked at 1.5Gb – and everything is running as smoothly as ever”
Raymond Berrott, Director of Technology
