Huntington Independent School District

Lessons of the past lead IT to prioritize top-notch support and forward-looking technology

The residents of Huntington, Texas, take pride in their school district. Rightly so. The Huntington Independent School District (ISD) serves more than 1,600 high school, middle school, intermediate school and elementary school students on five campuses. No matter the students’ needs, teachers and administrators are always there to support them. They expect the district-wide wireless network to do the same.

One day, when all 400 middle-school students logged onto Edgenuity courseware, the Wi-Fi crashed district-wide. Jeff Baird, technical director for Huntington ISD, called the vendor to fix problems, but the response was as slow as the network. Replacing APs or patching software didn’t improve the situation, either. The problems continued, and costs kept mounting.

When Baird presented a plan to the administration to replace the existing infrastructure, “everyone agreed that trying to shore up the existing infrastructure was just throwing good money after bad,” he explained. So, they rebid the project and selected CommScope.