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Lancaster ISD technology team proposes secondary network, asks board to ratify $108,339.85 firewall invoice
Summary
District technology staff proposed a secondary network failover hosted at the middle school after reporting 17 outages over four years, and said E-rate covers only the primary line; staff requested the board ratify a redundancy firewall invoice for $108,339.85 at a future meeting.
Lancaster ISD’s technology team told the school board on Feb. 11 that the district currently runs on a single AT&T connection that has led to outages affecting internet, phones, security cameras and students’ access to cloud-based curriculum. Jeffrey Williamson described 17 outages over the last four years — including fiber cuts, weather events, hardware failures and a nationwide outage — and proposed establishing a secondary network with the middle school acting as an automatic failover site.
Williamson said E-rate funding covers the primary AT&T line but not a secondary circuit, so implementing a true redundant network would be a district-funded investment. He asked the board to ratify a redundancy firewall invoice totaling $108,339.85 and said the technology team and finance have budgeted for the work.
Staff said the failover would operate nearly instantaneously so that phones, cameras and student access would not be disrupted during outages.
Status: the presentation was informational in the working session and staff asked for ratification of the invoice at an upcoming board meeting rather than taking the vote during the work session.
Provenance: Presentation and financial request were made during the Feb. 11 working session.
