The district has initiated the replacement of its legacy phone system with Avaya Voice Over IP (VOIP) system that will significantly improve communication with the district’s schools and Central Office departments. The new system utilizes contemporary communications protocols over the Internet and offers an array of features that will not only enhance communications, but will also ease staff mobility, as well as quick turnaround in provisioning phone services for newly hired staff. As part of the new solution, the district is expanding the phone system to classrooms by providing phones and voice services to all classroom teachers which will enhance teacher reachability as needed. The new system will also be used as an intercom solution within the schools as well as a notification system in situations such as inclement weather announcements. The district has provisioned redundancies at different levels of the new phone system to allow the system to continue to function even when certain components of the system experience outages.
The new Avaya solution has been implemented in multiple schools including the newly opened schools. Deployment to other schools in the district is in progress starting with schools that have historically had major phone system outages due to the age of the legacy phone system infrastructure. The funding for the project has been provided through Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief (ESSER) and American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds. The district plans to implement the solution in all district schools by the end of the 2022-2023 school year.