Cisco Aironet 1100 Series

At St. Joseph's Academy (www.sjabr.org), technology plays a central role in education. Each of the 800 students at the all-girl Catholic preparatory school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, receives a wireless-equipped laptop computer to view online instructional content and conduct research over the Internet. Students communicate with classmates, teachers, and students in other countries via e-mail and teleconferencing. Technology courses taken by 67 percent of the student body focus on networking, multimedia, and Web design. And students trained in network technology install equipment, maintain the academy's 11 servers and approximately 1000 computers, and staff the campus computer help desk.

All instructors at St. Joseph's Academy also receive laptops to prepare lessons, grade tests, and correct assignments anywhere on the 15-acre campus. Some use Blackboard Academic Suite, a networked application that allows educators to present video and Internet-based content over the network and create lessons that students can view online. In some science classes, computer-based learning has eliminated the need for textbooks. The infrastructure supports the school's Website, a database for managing school and student records, and most school operations, including access to grades, tests, and assignments, and office functions such as purchasing, billing, and registration. The use of technology has earned the academy numerous awards, including the U.S. Department of Education's Special Emphasis Award in Technology and a Cisco® Growing with Technology Award.

As technology became more and more central to the functioning of Saint Joseph's Academy, the school's aging network began to fail under the load. "Throughput became more and more inconsistent," says John Richardson, teacher and IS implementation director, St. Joseph's Academy. "Students and teachers could not move throughout campus without dropping a connection or losing a download." Breakdowns of aging switches and routers caused a growing number of service interruptions. And because the infrastructure included equipment from a variety of manufacturers, troubleshooting became increasingly complex and time consuming. "We were trying to manage a number of different models of switches, routers, and laptops, each with different brands of cards. It was hard to isolate a problem," Richardson says.

In late 2004, St. Joseph's Academy decided that the time was right for a comprehensive network upgrade. "We wanted technology that was going to be fast and work every time," Richardson says. Jane Metcalf, the academy's new director of technology, saw the advantages of using products from a single vendor. "I knew from past experience that it is best to bring all equipment and software up to the same level of technology and then replace them on a regular basis so that you do not have old equipment holding you back," she says. "Many schools buy their equipment in pieces, a little at a time. They do not get the economies of scale and pricing breaks that they could receive."

After evaluating products from a variety of equipment vendors, including Nortel, 3Com, and Cisco Systems®, St. Joseph's Academy chose a solution consisting of Cisco Catalyst® 3560G switches for six wiring closets, Cisco Catalyst 3560G and 3550 Series Switches for other key locations, and 60 new Cisco Aironet® wireless access points for hotspots throughout campus. Two students who had undergone extensive training in networking performed the installation. "The girls evaluated the campus wireless layout, installed every switch, cleaned every switch closet, rewired everything, and even installed and tested the access points. After this, they worked with students and faculty to ensure optimum operations and reliability," Richardson says. "That saved us about $10,000 that we would have had to pay for a site survey."

The Cisco Catalyst 3560G switches include Power-over-Ethernet capability, which eliminates the need to install separate AC power cables, reducing costs and making it easier to deploy wireless access points. The switches also supply Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to every desktop PC, server, and access point throughout campus, significantly increasing network capacity compared to the academy's previous maximum 100 Mbps wired and 11 Mbps wireless service.

St. Joseph's Academy also purchased new laptops equipped with Cisco wireless LAN client adapters for every student and teacher. "Cisco is the best that there is, and it is the equipment that we feel most comfortable with," Richardson says, explaining that the school has been using Cisco equipment for the last eight years. Metcalf says that she was also impressed by Cisco customer service. "The engineers and sales personnel were extremely helpful," she says. "They gave us a lot of time, talking about the differences between the new and old technology, and helping us decide what we needed without over- or underspending."

After deployment, students, teachers, and staff noticed an immediate and substantial boost in application performance. "The network is now 10 times faster, which allows the students to do more every week, every day. It allows us to transfer more information and to share it with students across the campus and the outside world," says Josh Fleig, a St. Joseph's Academy multimedia instructor. Moreover, the network is much more stable; the academy no longer experiences the outages that it did before deploying the new Cisco equipment. And now that the network is reliable, teachers who once were reluctant to use the network are beginning to use networked applications in class. "A network that is always available inspires confidence in teachers who were reluctant to give up pen and paper and try something new," he says.

In addition, the enhanced reliability and capacity of the wireless network give students and teachers much greater freedom. "Instead of sitting in one spot with a computer or having to wait for the next class, students can use their laptops anywhere on campus," Richardson says. "It lets them be totally mobile."

A faster, more dependable infrastructure also has given students and staff continuous access to bandwidth-intensive applications such as video conferencing and streaming video and audio. For example, students can use the network's video conferencing capability to speak to students in other countries, including Mexico and Belgium, for cultural and language exchanges. Additionally, SJA can record guest-speaker presentations and broadcast them across the network as well as take advantage of opportunities for video streaming. Many students have participated in telemedicine projects in partnership with several regional medical centers. Experts in a number of fields, including obstetrics/gynecology, dermatology, mental health, and eating disorders, conduct interactive lectures for physical education classes via the Internet. "Before we had to be careful about whether we had enough resources for a particular application. Now there is no waiting. Our students and teachers can use an application whenever they want to. So the excitement level is much higher as a result," Richardson says.

Because the system is based on equipment from a single vendor, new access points and laptops can be quickly and easily added to the network. That capability was vital to the academy's expansion efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Because the academy did not suffer major damage, it was able to admit approximately 200 New Orleans-area students displaced by the disaster. That forced the academy to hire three new teachers and add new laptops and access points to support them. "We were able to install new access points quickly and hand out laptops to students and faculty," Richardson says. "Having an end-to-end Cisco network was key to our rapid response."

St. Joseph's Academy is currently evaluating Cisco IP telephony and Cisco Voice over WLAN technology. "Running voice communications over our network would not only save phone costs, it would give teachers and administration the ability to answer phone calls and messages anywhere on campus," Richardson says. In addition, it would improve communications during emergencies.

The academy may soon deploy a Cisco 4400 Series WLAN controller to simplify management and administration of the wireless network. "If we had had a WLAN controller following Hurricane Katrina, we could have added new laptops and access points to help our students get back to their studies even more quickly," Richardson says.

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