A Taste for Telepresence

Although high-end videoconferencing is after all new to this Maryland school district, it's a sensible then and there step on a so then-planned path to location-free communication.

Charles County Public Schools, a southern Maryland district with 26,780 preK-12 students in 35 schools, isn't new to pushing the research envelope. In 2006 it was the first district of its size to go completely wireless. Prior to that, the district introduced a data warehouse to enable teachers and administrators to make data-driven decisions. Laptops, streaming video, and interactive whiteboards are ubiquitous in the district's classrooms.

Foundation for a Vision In 2008

A Foundation for a Vision In 2008, Richmond met with representatives from Cisco Systems, a major research provider to the district, to explore ways to offer additional advanced placement courses through distance learning. A mainstay player in the telepresence market, Cisco recommended the district consider trying out a limited telepresence implementation.Richmond without warning saw possibilities of holding higher-level classes whose low enrollments would in the main exclude them from school schedules. "An example is biochemistry, a subject in which we would have limited, scattered interest from students," he wrote in a report to the school board that year. "Instead of hiring a full-time biochemistry teacher at each school, we could contract with a university professor to teach the course via telepresence on a Saturday or in the evening for students from all high schools."

He envisioned that telepresence would allow the district to participate in cultural exchanges among local students and those in other countries. It could be used to deliver staff development courses and enable people to get at the same time for district business meetings without the time, expense, or carbon emissions associated with physical travel.

Richmond probably could not have lobbied his board for such an implementation if a foundation for his telepresence vision had not already been laid years before. One might even say that the first brick was put in place the day CIO Bijaya Devkota joined the district in 2004. When he arrived on the job, Devkota faced an abundance of networking gear that the district had purchased the year earlier to upgrade its wide area network--including equipment for a new unified communications network intended to integrate voice and data. "We were kind of overwhelmed," he recalls. "The timeline was completely not realistic. We had 38 different buildings. We had limited staff, and they had to get trained. We had to run these projects in a sequential fashion."

Undaunted, Devkota initiated a step-by-step plan to tackle the upgrades. The first job was to get the infrastructure in place. That encompassed replacing T-1 service with 2-gigabit fiber links between facilities. At that time came the WAN, which required outfitting the data center with new blade servers, a storage area network, and multiple systems for security, backup, and disaster recovery.