The district’s shift to a two–school campus in 2017 could allow it to build its own faster one, drop that bill and cover the cost to do it after just a few years of savings, Westmont schools technology director Joseph Molnar told the board this week.
That’s because the district is eligible for a 40 percent federal reimbursement off the $200,866 cost of the project.
That would drop the price tag to approximately $120,500 to create a 1.9-mile fiberoptic Wide-Area Network between the district’s Fair Oaks Drive middle/high school and future elementary school, he said.
Board officials are reviewing the project.
“Right now, we’re on a 1 gigabyte (per second) system through Atlantic Broadband, and we’re paying $36,000 a year for it,” Molnar said.
He said the district could create its own through a fiberoptic line system, running it along 92 telephone poles that separate the two revamped schools the district will operate in 2017.
Westmont Hilltop would need to upgrade infrastructure at both ends to handle 10- or 20-gigabyte-per-second bandwidth, but that cost will be included in the district’s project, said United Datacom Networks’ Clyde Zimmerman, a federally approved vendor that would guide the project through construction.
With students and faculty increasingly reliant on wireless devices in the classroom, those infrastructure upgrades are needed anyway, school administrators said.
Zimmerman said the district will need permission to run its network line on telephone poles – and that carries a $3 to $5 fee per pole. But that would be the only ongoing cost, as the district would undertake to develop its own fiber optic network, he said.
“It’ll serve your students very well for a long time, and at a reduced cost,” Zimmerman said.
Molnar said funds to cover the cost could be pulled from the district’s 2015-16 technology budget by continuing to delay computer upgrades.
He said work could begin in June and would take at least a year to complete.
Still, board members had questions about infrastructure costs and the process.
They voted to table the matter Monday but could vote on its approval at the special meeting on Thursday.
©2016 The Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, Pa.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
