When the new Sandy High School’s network is fully hooked up to computers,
cameras and other devices, Scott Coleman, Oregon Trail School District’s
technology director, estimates he will have to insert 2,000 patch cables into
their proper power or Ethernet outlets.

That’s 4,000 “clicks.”

But after all the clicking, the new building will offer students and teachers
capabilities that the old Sandy High School simply couldn’t.

At the center of it all is a windowless room featuring racks where fiber optics
enter and get split out via intermediate fibers to distribution points on each of
the school’s three wings and 10 other areas, where the network is then spread
out via copper cabling.

Almost all the school’s technological aspects run through this system of fibers
and cables: the phone system, security cameras, Internet (including wireless
Internet), fire alarms, lighting controls, heating controls and more.

The network infrastructure, Coleman explained, is like a system of roads for
the school’s technology and systems to use.

And now that a better and more effective road has been built, students will
have more opportunities to use it in various ways, including at some point
using digital textbooks instead of bound ones.

“The backbone is in, but the rest of it is not,” said Coleman, who noted the
money in the $114.9 million bond approved in 2008 to build the new high
school and improve the other schools won’t be used for end user devices such
as books (digital or otherwise), but that the district is pursuing grant money
and other funding to fund those acquisitions.

But the end result will help a number of programs at the high school take a
big leap forward.

The school will feature a TV studio, a radio station, a modern auto shop,
computer aided design and robotics classrooms and even the ability to set up
different domains within the network for computer programming classes to
utilize.

“This is an area we can do it really well for (students),” said Coleman, who
taught history at Sandy High School for seven years before moving into his
current position. “We can set up little networks, like a sandbox, to learn.”

And that’s not to mention some capabilities permitted by the network that
students may not even notice, such as classroom lights dimming as ambient
light increases during the day, heating controlled by zones to increase
efficiency and a security system to monitor who’s in the building and who
students leave the campus with (not to mention the capability for
administrators to lock down the entire building by pressing a single button or
even on a computer through the network).

The bond funded similar networks in all the district’s schools, which have
already been installed and are operational (and tied in to another windowless
room at the new Sandy High School).

The only difference, Coleman noted, is the size of the racks and how many of
the intermediate distribution fibers are used.

“The tax payers did a good thing for the kids by making this opportunity with
the bond,” Coleman said. “The infrastructure is in place to serve them for the
next decade at least.”

With the networks from across the district centralized at the high school,
Coleman noted there is less time and effort to manage them all while also
reacting quicker to problems. Some problems could be solved via the network
before they’re even noticed, but not everything will be fixed from afar.

“Some things will always require hands on help,” Coleman added.