A Wireless Overhaul at 10,500 Feet: Lake County School District

Lake County School District sits in Leadville, high in the mountains of central Colorado, at 10,500 feet. It is the highest-elevation school district in America, serving roughly 1,200 users across four schools. Twelve hundred users across four buildings is not a large network by city standards, but it carries everything: instruction, testing, attendance, food service, and the phones.

DJ Nephew had been the district's IT director for about a week when he was handed the project: a full district-wide WiFi overhaul, funded through E-Rate and awarded by competitive bid. The wireless network he inherited was seven years old and showed it. Dead zones had become part of the building's folklore, the sort of thing staff and students quietly route around rather than report. Going into the bid, Nephew was leaning toward Ubiquiti — the option he knew.

He came out of the bid choosing RUCKUS instead. The reason had as much to do with the team standing behind the hardware as with the hardware itself.

Pine Cove built a completely new wireless infrastructure alongside the district's own team, working through COVID-19 distancing requirements on site: dead zones mapped building by building and then eliminated, a completely new RUCKUS network across all four schools, Chromebooks, laptops, and a UPS supplied alongside the network, plus Securly student safety filtering and a migration to Office 365.

"The Pine Cove team is fantastic. The WiFi is fantastic. They deliver on their promises," Nephew says. "Pine Cove subtracts from my workload, unlike other vendors." The workarounds went away with the dead zones — staff stopped knowing which corner of which building not to stand in. For a one-person IT department at 10,500 feet, the durable result is the one Nephew names himself: the project subtracted from his workload instead of adding to it.