Hesperia Christian School was founded in 1966 by a group of concerned parents in south-central California who wanted to provide a Christian education for their children. In the past 45 years, enrollment has risen to about 250 students in pre-school through high school. The facilities have grown from one small classroom to 27 rooms plus a gymnasium and baseball and football fields. Hesperia Christian School exists to assist Christian families in their God-given responsibilities to train and nurture their children to be Christ-like by providing an education based on God’s Holy Word.

The Challenge
As Hesperia Christian School has increased their students, staff and facilities, they have also increased their use of technology and the Internet, particularly in terms of their school database which is now completely online. With the increase in use and applications, teachers and staff began noticing a marked decrease in the speed of their internet service, which was running at about 5Mbps downstream. They knew it was time to increase their bandwidth. They began investigating their options and, in part because of an excellent recommendation from an outside technology IT vendor, they decided to request a proposal from Spectrum Business.

The Solution
Spectrum Business delivered a win-win proposal that included a significant bandwidth increase to 100Mbps downstream, and handling of the school’s nine phone lines for roughly the same price they had been paying. “The increased speed has been tremendous,” said Hesperia Christian School Network Administrator Jim Boston. “Our school database is online with attendance records, grades, homework assignments, communication with parents, accounting, just about everything. At any given time, we might have 50 or 60 staff and teachers accessing information on it. We also now have room to grow our uses.”

Bundling makes the math work
Because the bandwidth increased so much, the internet price also increased over what Hesperia Christian School had been paying their previous provider. The Spectrum Business account representative suggested allowing Spectrum Business to service the school’s phone lines as well, which could be provided at a significant cost savings. When the entire transaction was complete, the net result was that Hesperia Christian School was paying roughly the same amount they had been before, but was getting a tremendous increase in download speed and increased reliability.

Installation cost garners Spectrum Business extra credit
To bring service to Hesperia Christian School, a fiber line needed to be constructed. “Spectrum Business bent over backwards to work with us on the installation cost required to connect our internet and phone services,” said Boston. “That was fantastic and really made a big difference in allowing us to immediately move forward with the transition to Spectrum Business.”

Speed Positions School for More Advances
In addition to having the entire school database online, teachers and students are using the Internet more and more, including cloud computing (the practice of using the Internet to process, manage and store data on remote network servers). Teachers download educational videos for use in their classes and for professional development. The yearbook team relies on sharing extensive photo files over the Internet. And students increasingly incorporate research, video, visuals and audio materials that they locate via the Internet in their projects and assignments.

Spectrum Business earns an “A”
Topping the list of benefits of using Spectrum Business is the significant increase in bandwidth for essentially no extra cost, but that’s not all. “The stability of the service has been fantastic,” recounted Boston. “In the first nine months of using Spectrum Business we’ve only had one or two problems, and they were handled quickly and professionally.” Boston also commented on the simplicity of having one bill for the phone and internet services. The true test, though, is that Boston has already referred other schools to Spectrum Business. “I talked with IT managers who said they were experiencing downtime with their internet service and that it was getting to the point where they literally couldn’t get some of their work done. I told them they needed to talk to Spectrum Business.”

 

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