Brainerd Public School District is one of the largest school districts in Minnesota. All of the district’s 13 schools house nearly 7,300 students and 1,000 faculty members. As with most public educational facilities, budget cuts constantly create setbacks with technology, affecting the Quality of Service (QoS) delivered to teachers and students.
Brainerd operates two different networks with Macs and PCs. With only four technicians for the entire district, Brainerd has limited bandwidth to support the district’s large network while simultaneously keeping Total Cost of Operation (TCO) down.
Updating every end point manually while assisting end users is an inefficient and expensive way to operate networks, so the IT department at Brainerd needed a quick solution. In response to their bleeding budget, Brainerd rolled out Terminal Server labs to mitigate some of the setbacks they were facing. With this solution, students had access to a standardized curriculum dispersed through Terminal Services, where they received access to MS Office and web-based applications. Each student had one mandatory roaming profile and logged into their desktops the same way. Unfortunately, this solution quickly spun out of control.
Problems with the new labs caused it to become common place for an admin to drive up to thirty miles just to solve small printing or roaming profiles issues for users, forcing Brainerd into another tough budgetary spot.
In conjunction to the Terminal Server labs, Citrix was deployed for 80 office administrators that use a financial and student management application “With 80 clients at $40 a client per year, we were looking at nearly $3,200 a year alone on Citrix. And that was only for the administrative staff!” said the Director of Media Technology of Brainerd Public School District, “We also didn’t want to use roaming profiles because of all the issues associated with it.”