Interview: Yuma Union High School District #70
Dean Farar
Chief Information Officer
Eric Patten
Chief Communications Officer
Our team interviewed Dean Farar, Chief Information Officer, and Eric Patten, Chief Communications Officer for Yuma Union High School District, to hear about their WANRack experience and how their network has grown to be a part of their students and teachers every day!
Tell us about your background and how you both came to your current Yuma Union School District role.
DEAN: Dean Farar, Chief Information Officer for Yuma Union High School District. I have been with the district since 2001.
ERIC: Eric Patten, Chief Communications Officer for the district, and I have been there since 2016, but in this role since 2017.
What did your network look like before WANRack? And what does it look like now that you have a WANRack WAN Solution?
DEAN: That's a great question! We used a local cable service provider that provided us with a 1000 Mbps connection to all our sites.
Our district has always been very forward-thinking, and we knew that as we continued to grow in internet usage, our WAN would need to grow too. With our provider at the time, we knew that to grow, we needed a new solution. So in 2015, we put out an RFP, and WANRack was a respondent. We only knew WANRack after that, but they had a compelling value proposition that was the best we received! It was scary since no inherent optics were in place to use, but we decided to take a chance on WANRack.
WANRack connects 30 of our schools across 45 miles. They provide us with unlimited bandwidth at a fixed rate. With WANRack, we can grow at our own pace and not be charged whenever we need an upgrade. WANRack got us the speeds we wanted and added a layer of security we didn't know was available to us!
When I tell people what we pay, others are blown away. However, we have set ourselves up to be in a position where if E-Rate ever went away, we would be in a financial situation that we could afford. The initial price was impressive and one of the reasons WANRack was awarded our contract, but the renewals since have been amazing!
How was the construction process?
DEAN: WANRack estimated (this is what I think is the crazy part!) that it would take about eight months to build our network. At the time, they ran 35 miles of fiber throughout our county to make that happen, working through all the permitting with the county, city, water, railroads, and bureau of land management, and they still got it done on time! For all of that to transpire and hit the target was truly amazing!
Since then, we have added four more sites, which took a bit more time due to dealing with different municipalities. We actually ended it on a military base, so that added time, as I am sure anyone can imagine. Everyone on our team is so impressed with how smoothly each project has gone. Now it's my expectation when working with WANRack.
Any advice you would give another school district considering a network overhaul?
DEAN: Yes! You need to be patient; this is a long-term project with long-term advantages, and you must be able to roll with it! The benefits of waiting to have your own network far outweigh if you were to continue to use the incumbent!
Is there anything you would change about your process? Or anything you would have done differently?
DEAN: Honestly, I always tell people, I don't know if we just had one of the best experiences we could have when doing something like this or what, but we have no complaints. We have had a few environmental issues, and WANRack has been great to work with. WANRack has done a phenomenal job. So I have no negative feedback!
What do the next five years at Yuma look like?
DEAN: Right now, WANRack. As we get new schools, we will continue to grow our WANRack network, but as of today, we have everything we need!
Final Thoughts?
DEAN: During Covid, our teaching and learning became more technology integrated. We now have many applications that our students and teachers use online. The day-in and day-out operations in terms of our core teaching and learning business rely on WANRack working. I can count on three fingers how many times in the last five years we have had an issue that has impacted teaching and learning when it comes to our network, and when we look at that WANRack has been a great provider and partner and has helped us deliver the education that we are expected to deliver to our students!
ERIC: Piggybacking on what Dean has shared, I sent out the messages and posts when the network was down or had outages. We have had three outages, and WANRack has always had us back up and running immediately. This is amazing, considering we have schools spread throughout the county.
Dean didn't do justice to how we needed a workable network. Since before Covid 19, the reliance on our network for the day-to-day with our students was something we were working towards. During the 2019-2020 school year, we started to transition all our lesson plans and day-to-day classroom operations for students and teachers into a management system online. Today knowing we have a network that we can rely on to make that deliverable an efficient success makes a smaller part of our job that much easier. We are no longer worrying about network crashes. Having the thought in the back of your mind that the systems you were working on might fail is not a burden that we want our educators to have to deal with! Everyone in our district can easily say this is alleviated because of WANRack. WANRack is great because it just works!
WANRack helps education.
