The Marana Unified School District, located near Tucson, Arizona, is one of the largest and most rapidly growing districts in the southern portion of the state. The district includes the town of Marana, several additional communities within Pima County, and an ever-increasing number of residential developments.

The district currently features 18 campuses – 17 schools and a district campus. A population increase has left the district trying to catch up – The City of Marana has 25,000 homes scheduled to be built in the next five years, and district officials anticipate having to construct one to two new schools per year to keep up with the residential growth. Projections indicate that by 2025, the district will include 43 schools.

“We have worked for three years to come up with a joint wireless network with the City of Marana and the Northwest Fire District,” says Marana’s technology director, Dan Hunt.  “Our infrastructure could not support the items identified in our new Strategic Plan for student success  for the district. “We decided we couldn’t wait any longer; we needed to deal with our present need for higher bandwidth between campuses and to the Internet and prepare for the growth we know we’re going to have.

The district’s campuses had been functioning on wired or underground networks, leading to disconnections when cabling was dug up during construction. The district’s increasing amount of Web-based programs – specifically those used for district assessment testing, financial and library services, and special education programs – led to an overabundance of web traffic and slowness on the district’s network.  The wired network could no longer keep up.

“The community demands proven world class technology,” Hunt says. “Functioning on a wired network has been very difficult.” Hunt adds that the district is trying to increase bandwidth to provide timelier Internet services and more learning opportunities for staff and students, including voice, video, and data services.  The District went through a rigorous RFP process as well as did our research on the companies that would be able to partner with us to help us achieve our goals, and when all was said and done, Marana chose Trillion to help us solve our bandwidth problems. 

Trillion’s high speed wide area network services will allow the district to consolidate its 110 servers and disparate phone systems into a much more manageable enterprise environment. “Each school has three to five of their own servers presently,” Hunt says. “With Trillion’s high-speed network, we will be able to consolidate those into a server farm [a collection of computer servers usually maintained by an enterprise to accomplish server needs far beyond the capability of one machine], and keep everybody on the latest and greatest technology at a much lower cost. The high speed wide area network links will allow the addition of a fully Web-based student information system and data warehouse that has been much needed in the district. The converged data, voice and video applications will also allow the district to pursue video conferencing and distance education to provide additional high-level learning opportunities for Marana’s students. Leveraging E-Rate dollars, a voice over Trillion Network phone system and wireless wide area network are going to be doing that at a lower cost per month than what we’re currently paying just for telephone service.”