Case Study
When the Wi-Fi Goes Down, So Does the Greenhouse: Prairie View Community School
How a tiny Wyoming charter school — with an aquaponics system, a student-run laser-engraving business, and no IT department — found a technology partner who understood what they were trying to do.
Prairie View Community School sits about an hour north of Cheyenne, in a town of roughly 200 people. It was the first state-sponsored charter school in Wyoming, and it does not teach the way most schools teach. Learning here is project-based and physical: students build and troubleshoot their own circuits, run an aquaponics system that has to stay alive through a weekend, and operate a student-managed laser-engraving business. In a school like this, a dropped connection isn't an inconvenience. It's a class that doesn't happen.
What Prairie View inherited wasn't really a network. It was a stack of decisions made years apart by people who were no longer there: Wi-Fi that worked in one room and quit in the next, internet that never reached every building, landline phones that had become a safety risk, and cameras and door access hardware already past end of life. There was no IT department to hand any of it to — Director Bryce Cushman wore the IT hat on top of running the school. During a student-led demonstration of an automated greenhouse the students had designed and built themselves, the connection dropped and took the demonstration down with it.
Prairie View was referred to Pine Cove for help with E-Rate. The first conversation went somewhere else entirely. "The first conversation wasn't about products or services," Cushman says. "They wanted to understand what we were trying to accomplish as a school. I'd never had a technology company ask me those questions before."
Pine Cove designed and implemented a new network on RUCKUS technology, chosen for its performance, its cost, and its E-Rate compatibility: a full wireless refresh across every building, separate networks for student and staff traffic, landlines retired and rebuilt on VoIP, the entire E-Rate paperwork and compliance process handled end to end, and ongoing outsourced IT covering monitoring, security guidance, Google Admin support, hardware recommendations, and staff training.
Every building is now covered by consistent, reliable Wi-Fi, zero landlines remain, and E-Rate funding was secured with compliance handled end to end. The fourth result doesn't have a number attached to it: confidence. At the next community showcase, the automated greenhouse ran exactly the way the students built it to run — with sensors feeding a dashboard they had coded themselves, and a connection that never once dropped.
