St. Joan of Arc Catholic School
St. Joan of Arc Catholic School was established in 1960 by St. Joan of Arc Parish, having grown from a small school operating in a warehouse to their current campus facility in central Boca Raton Florida, serving over 500 students in grades pre-kindergarten through eighth.
St. Joan of Arc is a U.S. Department of Education “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) Blue Ribbon School of Academic Excellence. This prestigious award recognizes schools for academic achievement and performance.St. Joan of Arc School, as part of the parish faith community, commits to building the Catholic identity of its students, to challenging them academically and to preparing them for lives of service to others.
St Joan of Arc CatholicChurch and School is distributed across multiple buildingsat theircampus style facility. Having grownand over evolved years, each building was served by local public telephone network connections, billed under spate carrier accounts. The school and church shared a common telephone system, this was obsolete and required expensive and proprietary vendor services to manage and support.
The facility had recently been expanded to include multiple residential homes adjacent to the main campus site. St Joan IT department was asked to extend network and voice connectivity to the buildings on the campus perimeter.
The existing telephone system was not capable of being integrated to the peripheral buildings. Connecting stand alone telephones and isolated networks in each building was neither fiscally or operationally acceptable.
Celtic Communications, having analyzed the campus carrier billing information, proposed a comprehensive Telephone, Fax and campus-wideWireless Network upgrade. The collective monthly savings realized by consolidating voice carrier accounts and replacing them with contemporary voice PRI-ISDN technology, meant that St Joan of Arc Catholic Church and School were able to self fund the new technology investments .
The resulting technology upgrade positioned a Vertical Hybrid IP PBX in the main campus building; using a Cisco Wireless LAN controller in conjunction with strategically placed antennas around the campus, St Joan was able to extend a secure high speed wireless network across the campus footprint, enabling the deployment of IP telephonein the campus perimeter buildings.
Options for self-service Automated Attendant, and Automated Church and School event notification reminders helped St Joan better provideservices to parishioners and students and reduced the work load on administrative staff.
Integrated faxing services, further enhanced the solution by allowing the migration to a paperless system. Personal and departmental fax DID numbers where activated whereadded,a searchable indexed archive of all faxes received and sent ensures easy access to historical fax documents when needed.
Using the Cisco LAN controller, IT administrative staffs were able to simplify network maintenance and standardize wireless access security policies across the campus footprint. The resulting high performance wireless network isaccessible to administrative staff, teachers and students equipped with the pertinent security credentials.
Finally and very importantly, the converged Voice, Fax and Data network design has resulted in efficiencies that have translated into tangible reductions in cost of both human resources and circuitry expenses that have offset a significant part of the technology upgrade investment cost.