Interview: John Eagle, Director of Information Technology for Hampton City Schools
John Eagle
Director of Information Technology for Hampton City Schools
WANRack: First, welcome, and thank you for meeting with us! Please tell us briefly about your background and how you came to your current role at Hampton City Schools. And how long have you been in your role at the district?
John Eagle: Yeah! My pleasure; excited to be here! So let's see, I was born at night. Haha, but really I started as a programmer working for the schools many years ago, and then I went to work for the city for a couple of decades. Then in 2010, the schools had an opening for an IT director position, and I thought, Yeah, this sounds like fun, so I applied, and they welcomed me back with open arms! And I'm actually retiring this year; the only thing keeping me from retiring is this project!
WANRack: Congrats! You've got to see it through; a light is at the end of the tunnel!
John Eagle: I promised the superintendent that I would stay until this project was done and lit.
WANRack: I'm sure the superintendent appreciates that, and we do too!
John Eagle: Our community is pretty cool. We have a history of being high-tech. We have Langley Air Force Base and Langley NASA. The Langley NASA facility is where they trained the original astronauts back in the '60s. Our “main street” is called Mercury Boulevard after the Mercury missions. We have several bridges and other roads named after prominent scientists and NASA astronauts. We are a very old community, founded in 1610. We like to brag that we are the oldest continuously English-speaking settlement in the country, and we had the first free public school in Hampton.
That said, we have some socio-economic challenges. We have different financial resources than some of the Northern Virginia communities have. And so it's a challenge for us, but again, it's interesting because, at the same time, we are historically a high-tech community.
Our community invests quite a bit in our schools, which is one thing I love about this community. They are one of the reasons I came to this position because, you know, we were the first in the area to do a one-to-one program, and it was the city council that said, John do you think we could do this if we figured out a way to fund it and I was like, absolutely. And so, back in 2013, we started issuing iPads to all our middle school students. Over time we moved over to Chromebooks, and we had every student get a Chromebook when the pandemic happened. So we were fully prepared to transition to at-home learning and then back again. We already had all of that infrastructure in place. So again, we are a high-tech school division leading the charge of doing all these incredible things. And that brings me to our network. I do a lot with infrastructure, and with all of the Chromebooks and other things I just mentioned, our network becomes the most critical component.
Are you familiar with Moore's Law? Moore's Law states that things get twice as fast about every two years while at the same time going down in price. We saw that with the speed of computers for many years, and it's still going on today. But the same thing is true with bandwidth. When I talked to some of my colleagues, I asked, "Do you remember when we had 1 Meg connections to the school?” That seemed like a huge amount of data, and now we have 1 Gig connections, and we know that more is needed. Having our own fiber network and pushing however much data we need through those circuits makes perfect sense. And fortunately, the stars have lined up in such a way with a company like WANRack.
WANRack: Can you describe the district's network configuration before WANRack? You were pretty happy with your current provider. What changes were you looking for in switching to a new provider and tackling a network overhaul?
John Eagle: We were on a shared network. But, they guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth, and as we all know, providing more and more connectivity can be costly. We are talking about 38 locations and 31 schools, and seven satellite support locations. The kind of bandwidth that we believe we will need in the next five to 10 years is very difficult to obtain with an incumbent provider because, again, their fiber is being used by all the customers in the area. So not only is it expensive, there are technical roadblocks. So, we were not unhappy with them, and they understand that this is really about being positioned for the future by putting this fiber in. My successor will not have to worry about the network infrastructure for at least another 25 years! This is something that's going to be an information superhighway. These are the roads of the digital network being built.
WANRack: How did you know that it was time for an upgrade? Were you starting to see bottlenecks? Or were you just ready and secretly ready to retire!? :)
John Eagle: So, we've wanted to do this for a while. Some school divisions were able to go out and do similar projects through bonds. They went out and got a ten-million-dollar bond and built their own fiber network. They accomplished essentially the same thing but at a much higher price. Two things opened the door to this. One was the E-Rate program, and the other was that the state said it would match the funds. So this project was a no-brainer.
WANRack: Yeah, so the next question is about how we have many customers that say they started to notice the importance of a reliable network during and post-covid. With the influx of people at home relying on their networks, they realized they needed something dependable. Can you speak about how daily classroom activity affects your guys' network?
John Eagle: We have 20,000 students connected at any given time during the day. We routinely see over 30,000 devices connected to our network, between Chromebooks, lab computers, systems and softwares, and students' and staff's personal devices. The list goes on and on, so we track and look at the bandwidth utilization at the schools and in the classrooms. We know right now that some of the biggest bottlenecks are in the classroom because the Wi-Fi technology is barely keeping up, and much of that has to do with just the sheer numbers I mentioned. There's just so much Wi-Fi traffic going on, and all of that, again, depends on the backbone. The backbone is the fiber network that we're talking about. And so, we see an upward growing trend when we look at that. We know that we have to plan for this. We know that we have to prepare for the Wi-Fi upgrade too. You can't ignore any piece of it. This is just one major piece, but the other is to upgrade all of our Wi-Fi infrastructure too. It's all about timing because we have a pretty solid Wi-Fi network, but as you mentioned, introducing so many devices and so much activity shows the stress on the network backbone. The pandemic also stressed the importance of good learning management systems, and those systems, you know, are what students use to see what their homework assignments are, turn in their homework and to do research. That all takes bandwidth. There's been an explosion of bandwidth demand, and we see that continuing to increase. If we don't plan now, we won't be able to keep up. So, it's really about being proactive and planning for the future.
WANRack: So, let's talk about your E rate process.
John Eagle: Great question! We started this process five years ago in earnest to figure out how to make this work. We did not have an E-rate consultant at the time, but we have used the E-Rate program heavily over the years. When I came on board, we didn't even take advantage of Category 2 funding, and when we realized that we were making a huge mistake, we decided we needed to take advantage of those funds, we got proficient at it. But this project's scope was much larger, with many moving parts. So five years ago, we did an RFI. We wanted to know what companies are doing projects like this, and see what kind of interest there is.
What we found was WANRack and a handful of other companies were doing projects of this scope. So we issued an RFP while also going through a renewal process. We looked at things like if we just upgraded our bandwidth using our incumbent provider versus hiring somebody to build us our own. During that process, we realized that there are many moving parts, and for us to do something like this on our own, we will need to have our act together. So that's when we hired our E-Rate consultant.
WANRack: Sweet. If you had to pick your three favorite things from the WANRack solution that was offered to you, what would they be? What made you select WANRack?
John Eagle: Three things… I have four!
Number one was that WANRack did their homework. Their proposal was very well thought out. They addressed all of our locations. They had calculations in their proposal that showed that they were serious and knew what they were doing. I liked their confidence.
They were doing other business and similar projects in the area!
PRICE! Price was a major thing. Because they did their homework, they demonstrated that they could execute our project at the best price.
They understand schools, and they know E-Rate. They helped simplify this project and make it more digestible for us! Everything went smoothly, and they understood where we had concerns. I can't overstate the importance of that aspect of it because, after you've been working months and months on something and you're in the final days, it's crucial to have a vendor that knows what they're doing and has experience.
WANRack: What key takeaways or advice after this process would you give to any other K-12 IT director? This advice could be for someone thinking about going through this process or is in the thick of negotiating a contract. Or maybe they're at the planning stage you were at five years ago.
John Eagle: Well, they could hire me when I retire. Haha! No, all jokes aside. I think two things…
One would be if you can get an E-rate consultant, get one. I highly recommend it because it is a major project, and having the help of someone who knows the ropes and how these things work is huge.
Talk to your peers that have also done projects like this.
WANRack: We have had conversations with many school districts that think they can build their own private fiber on their own. We get the question: Why hire you and pay tons of money when we can do it? I won't tell you they can't because they definitely can. But then you're in charge of all the construction, permitting, contractors, engineering, materials, and maintenance. Wouldn't you rather a third party be responsible for all that?
John Eagle: We don't want to do the permitting alone. Haha!
WANRack: Obviously, we are biased, but why wouldn't you go through a vendor? They will do it all for you.
John Eagle: Yeah. I give the schools that do it on their own credit because it's challenging work!
