WCS Saves $130K Over 5 Years By Bidding Out Internet Service
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
By bidding out Warsaw Community Schools’ internet service and awarding it to MetroNet, Director of Technology Brad Hagg said he expects to save the school corporation over $130,000 during the five-year contract.
“We have the opportunity, as part of the E-rate process, to, for the first time I think in Warsaw Community Schools’ history, to put out our internet service for a bid process,” he said.
Warsaw Schools always bid on the state contract. The state provider of internet was through Education Networks of America (ENA), headquartered in Tennessee.
“The state decided that with so much fiber built up throughout the state of Indiana that they no longer wanted to provide a statewide bid for internet. They thought a school’s best path would be to competitively bid it in their local communities, and I think we find that suddenly for us, that comes very much the case,”?Hagg said.
He said the school district put its internet access out to bid, pursuing vendors it knew were in the community while also opening it up through the federal E-rate program.
The universal service schools and Libraries Program, commonly known as “E-rate,” provide discounts of up to 90 percent to help eligible schools and libraries in the United States obtain affordable telecommunications and internet access.
Hagg said WCS ended up with three proposals, but “we have the opportunity to take our internet to a much higher speed.”
As an analogy, he said WCS’s current internet access is going at 1,000 mph. “We, on all three of these quotes, would go to 10,000 mph,” he said.
2019 guidelines for what students should have for bandwidth indicate “we should have 1,000 megabits per 1,000 students by that year. We will actually have two to spare with this proposal and we will do it immediately, this summer,” he stated.
“The great part of that is, because our discounts are going down a little bit because of our Free and Reduced Lunch percentage, and because of the lower monthly pricings, we will actually save $2,000 a month while we do that – $2,180. That’s an annual savings of $26,184, and over the total five years of the contract, it’s $130,920 and it’ll be 1,000 percent of the current speed. So it’s phenomenal,” Hagg explained.
He said ENA was the highest price proposal unfortunately, but their price was still lower than what WCS is paying. “But nowhere near the opportunity we have with MetroNet. They were clearly the lowest provider in the process,” Hagg said.
While CenturyLink also is in the community, he said it didn’t have the infrastructure, so its pricing was in the same ballpark as ENA’s.
