For many schools in the U.S., the need to catch up to technology is a fact of life. For Westminster Christian Academy in the St. Louis suburb of Town & Country, Missouri, technology has had to catch up to them. The school combines middle and high school grades 7-12 and was founded in 1975. Recently they completed a decade-long real estate odyssey that found the school in possession of a new 70-acre campus and a newly built state-of-the-art building with advanced HVAC and other backbone systems. The $55 million project would be capped off the by implementation of advanced automated systems that would handle most of the school’s communications needs, from scheduling bells to signal class changes, to digital signage throughout the hallways that would provide activities and wayfinding information.
However, Kent Kehr, the school’s director of Technology, was concerned that he’d need multiple vendors to provide individual systems to handle each of these tasks. Integrating those disparate systems would prove daunting at best. “I was looking at separate products for each of our concerns. I realized that that would be a huge undertaking under any circumstances, but we were also looking at having to get the project completed in 14 months, even as we were still moving out of the old location,” he recalls. “I was pretty stressed over the idea of having to coordinate seven or eight individual vendors and manage to integrate all of those functions into a single system.”
The solution turned out to be SchoolView, an AMX systems product, now distributed by Graybar and tailored for the K-12 market. It provides automated control over system functions, including public address systems, security cameras, energy management, video-on-demand, digital signage and emergency alert notifications. It does this from a single location using AMX SchoolView touch panels, all over an IP network within the school.
Return on Investment
Kehr was genuinely thrilled to have found a comprehensive solution for the school. SchoolView fulfilled almost all of the functions he had in mind, and it likely was able to do it for not much more money than he’d have spent across multiple vendors to achieve the same result. Kehr says he hadn’t gotten to the point here he had taken bids from those vendors, so he doesn’t have an immediate benchmark to measure ROI versus the cost of independent parallel systems. But he is sure that any additional costs will be made up on the back end, in terms of operating efficiencies; for instance, intuitive operation meant that training for teachers and technical staff took just a single day. In addition, the system will receive operating-system upgrades free of charge from AMX in the future.
Kehr also measures savings from the efficiencies of the SchoolView system. These include having all of the system’s per-classroom hardware, such as the Cisco network switch, reducible to a 2 x 2-foot box, which fits perfectly into a tile space in the grid-ceilinged classrooms. The only other hardware are speakers, which are distributed four per room for even coverage and the dry-erase whiteboards that are illuminated by Epson PowerLite projectors. “If we had had to go with the separate vendors, we would have needed separate speakers for paging and other audio, and each of those would have needed their own amplifiers,” says Kehr. “That eliminated the equivalent of three IDF [intermediate distribution frame] closets and all the vertical cabling that goes with that. Combined with the more compact rack space that the system uses versus individual vendor systems, we figured we got back space equivalent to one and a half additional classrooms.”
Other savings are derived from the fact that the SchoolView system’s endpoints are manufacturer agnostic, and the school was able to chose many of its hardware systems, such as the projector/whiteboard combination, which allows teachers to use their own laptops as content sources, versus the purchase of smart boards. This saved the school over $300,000, Kehr estimates.
“The SchoolView system did everything we needed it to do,” says Kehr. At this point, this is where the manufacturer’s case-study brochures tend to leave things, with happy, tidy endings. Real life, though, especially real life with deadlines looming as new technologies are encountered, can sometimes be a little messy. For instance, budget considerations meant that several components of the SchoolView system weren’t purchased, such as feature that ties control of the school’s HVAC systems into SchoolView’s control. HVAC is instead managed over IP directly by the school’s director of Facility Management.
Westminster also left off of its list the ResQ automated emergency response feature, a voice
