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High-Speed Public School Network Delivers Equal Access

High-Speed Public School Network Delivers Equal Access

The Arizona State Legislature created the School Facilities Board (SFB) in 1998 to correct inequities among the state's 228 school districts. To ensure all K-12 students an environment that nourishes learning, SFB established minimum standards that every school in the state must meet by June 2003. SFB administers funds for new construction and for correcting deficiencies in existing school buildings. As part of its mandate, SFB must ensure that students have adequate access to information technology, and therefore, the SFB is working with Denver-based Qwest Communications International Inc. to meet that requirement.

ARIZONA'S NEEDS

SFB determined that each school should have at least one computer for every eight students, those computers should be networked to one another and they should have high-speed access to the Internet. SFB also decided to offer a broad menu of software programs, free to the schools, through an application service provider (ASP).

"Closing the digital divide between rich and poor schools is a vital part of SFB's mandate because computers engage students in active learning," said Dr. Philip E. Geiger, SFB's executive director. When students use interactive and multimedia materials, "they retain more, they learn faster and they develop high-order thinking skills," he said.

To achieve the required 1:8 computer-to-student ratio, SFB purchased and distributed more than 36,000 new computers for $44.2 million. The next steps were to connect all the computers in each building on a local area network (LAN); connect the schools in each district on a wide area network (WAN); and link the WAN to the Internet over a broadband connection that could carry voice, video and data to each computer.

SFB wanted to make one company fully responsible for the networking project. The contractor had to be large and capable enough to network all of Arizona's 1,250 schools in 18 months, and provide ongoing monitoring and maintenance. "And we wanted a company that was going to be here long after the project was done, so the 25-year warranty could be enforced," Geiger said.

QWEST COMES THROUGH

In February 2001, the governor