Vallecitos School District to upgrade phone system

The Vallecitos School District will be upgrading its telephone system.

A 5-0 Vallecitos board vote, Aug. 11, approved a proposal from AT&T for a new phone system for the district. The school district will pay, including what will be subsidized by the San Diego County Office of Education, $10,013.28 in one-time fees and $277.85 each month. The San Diego County Office of Education’s Information Technology staff will support part of the system installation to reduce the cost to the school district.

“It’s long overdue,” Michael Darnley, board president of Vallecitos School District, said.

The school district’s existing phone system is outdated and no longer able to be reasonably maintained. The system will be replaced with a hosted VOIP service network. VOIP stands for voice over internet protocol, which allows internet use for telephone and videophone communication. The hosted VOIP service has telephony features, local and domestic long-distance calling, unified messaging which integrates voicemail with electronic mail notification of voice messages and administrative web-based interfaces.

AT&T will also provide on-site and remote installation of the system and will provide maintenance and monitoring of the equipment. The charges are based on a per-user basis, and the contract allows for additional sites or templates with the appropriate payments. AT&T will also perform firmware upgrades on end points and will do so after normal school district business hours so that normal district operations will not be interrupted. AT&T will give the school district a week’s notice about new releases and firmware upgrades.

The HVS system is available only for certain makes and models of telephone sets, so all of the phones in the school district’s offices and classrooms will be replaced. Vallecitos will also receive two conference phone units.

“We’re getting conference phones for the conference rooms,” Maritza Koppen, superintendent of Vallecitos School District and principal of Vallecitos Elementary School, said.

AT&T will assign a project manager to be the single point of contact. The project manager will have overall responsibility for the implementation and will schedule a kickoff meeting to initiate the engagement. The project manager will also coordinate scheduling for the user database collection workshop. Vallecitos will also have a single point of contact who will work with the project manager to establish an implementation schedule. The user database includes specific information for each Vallecitos user, and before the installation, AT&T will build and set up that database. Vallecitos will be responsible for the user database after completion of the implementation but will have access to the OpEasy Tool application which can update the database.

AT&T will also provide web-based training and telephone user guides. AT&T is willing to provide on-site training for an additional charge to assist Vallecitos staff members with functionality, feature usage, voicemail and assistant overview.

Joe Naiman can be reached by email at [email protected].