ERATE at Pimeria Alta Academy
Pimeria Alta Academy has come a long way with its technology infrastructure since 2004-2005. In its first year of existence (then Pimeria Alta Accommodation School), the only technology that the school had was one newly purchased Compaq PC for the front office, some refurbished IBM's for the students and other staff, some other donated PC's, a laser printer, and a few wireless access points purchased from WalMart. The school operated on a simple, not so secure, peer-to-peer network with everyone connecting to network resources wirelessly. Some of the administrators got together and applied for ERATE funding that year, but were not able to navigate the extensive application process to secure the funds for the school.
The following year, Steve Upson, District Educational Technology Specialist completed a successful application yet the funds were lost due to missing some critical final steps in the billing process. "It was tough to get that far through the process, only to lose the funds.", said Steve Upson. "It was a valuable learning experience for me and everyone in the district." In 2006-2007, another successful application was submitted and finally the school got a small piece of the billions available through the program, about $2,000 which paid for local telephone and internet services.
In 2009-2010, the decision was made to hire a consultant to assist with the application process, and really develop a good application that would provide the equipment and services necessary to improve the network infrastructure at the school, effectively moving us into the 21st Century. We submitted a rather large application, requesting about $70,000 worth of cabling, equipment, and services like VOIP, Internet, and Support. For the most part this application was a huge success, considering previous year's disappointments. Everything was approved, but a small glitch with one vendor, held up the entire appilcation until late late May of the funding year. (Lesson Learned: Submit separate 471's for each service).
In June of 2010, the VOIP equipment was installed and we obtained a used Server Rack, and by July 1 all of the cabling and remaining equipment installations had been completed. The school has wired classrooms now, two with ceiling mounted projectors and SMART Boards (from other funding sources) as well as wireless provided by 3 Cisco Access Points. We are now able to host all of our services on site, and as we look toward the future of education we are working toward future increases in bandwidth to enable distance learning opportunities for our students and staff.
Update: 06/27/2011
Pimeria Alta Academy was just approved for $11,138 for the upcoming 2011-2012 school year. This would be the typical amount for Tier 1 services that we receive each year, and covers our analog and VOIP telephone services, as well as our Internet connections for the school.
Our Tier 2 services for Basic Maintenance of Internal Connections adds up to approximately $21,800 this year, but Tier 2 services usually take a little longer to get approved to make sure enough monies are available for all applicants Tier 1 services.
This year's Tier 1 services approval has enabled the school to increase the bandwidth available for teachers to 7-Mbps, while making sure the students have their own 7-Mbps connection for delivering the curriculum right to their desktops. This is also going to help the district move forward with a project to add our Library Media Center to our ERATE applications in future funding years, and join the library to the school network.