The Douglas County School District (DCSD,) located in Minden, Nevada, serves more than 6,000 K-12 students across several communities in the beautiful Carson Valley and Lake Tahoe regions. Their seven elementary schools, three middle schools, and three high schools provide over 6,000 students with a high quality education based on District Competency Objectives and Common Core Standards.
The administrators at the Douglas County School District (DCSD) are not only committed to their students’ education, but to ensuring their safety at all times too. That’s why they needed a fully functioning phone system. They set out to find an affordable and future-proof solution that could adapt along with the schools needs as well as remain available during any potential emergency. Fortunately for DCSD, they were able to switch to 3CX in no time at all, and have seen massive benefits as a result.
THE CHALLENGE
When the DCSD phone system failed, they were informed it would take weeks to fix. With no means for communication, DCSD’s IT Director John Endter feared for the safety of their kids. Heset out to find a more reliable phone system that would run on non-proprietary hardware.
Faced with the task of replacing DCSD’s old Nortell analog system and Allworx VoIP system, Endter decided to consolidate all of the disparate phone systems onto one platform.
THE SOLUTION
After evaluating 3CX, Jive®*, and Cisco®* systems, 3CX was chosen for being more cost effective, (a huge concern for any public school), and for accommodating DCSD’s critical safety needs. As a public school district, DCSD was required to maintain three analog lines, two fire alarms, and one security alarm to ensure coverage in case of an emergency as long as the power is maintained. 3CX enables DCSD to reroute calls to the analog lines if the district WAN goes down or the PRI fails. This kind of flexibility really came through during a time of crisis.
“We had a major windstorm that knocked out power to five of the 13 school sites. The district superintendent called my cell phone and asked how we could possibly communicate with the parents of the students at the affected sites. Solution: reroute all the affected site calls to our primary PRI site. Within 15 minutes, we were able to reroute all the calls of those [affected] sites to our main district site that has generator power. We then added an emergency message that would tell callers what was happening and then give them the option to reach a school representative. We fielded over 250 calls in about an hour and were able to calm the concerns of the parents. Switching to 3CX was one of the best decisions we have made. The 3CX system is easy to configure and manage, it runs on hardware we already owned, and the ROI will be less than three years.”John Endter, IT Director, DCSD
