Weldon Intermediate School

Assessing Network Needs

Project Bears

The Weldon School teaches fourth and fifth grade students. It is located in Gladewater, Texas. This part of the process will allow us to get an overview of the needs of the School as far as communications and structure of the facility. The first thing we will look at will be the size of the facility.

The School supports 25 faculty members, 1 principal and about 300 students. These numbers have remained consistent within the past 15 years. There is no future growth planned other than making room for an unusually large class every now and then.

Weldon has been helping students now for 15 years. The methods used in class helps students prepare for entering middle school. The children have a homeroom class but move classes during the day for specialized classes not taught by their homeroom teacher. Currently, the students have access to computers in the classroom. There is an average of two computers per classroom. These computers are mainly used for Advanced Reading Cirriculum (ARC).

The security aspects of these environments need to be placed in two places. The first being employee personal data. Social Security Numbers, pay rate, and other personal information need to be secure. Secondly, the students grading and reporting software need to be secure with high fault tolerance. This data can not be lost for any reason.

The grade management software is the only mission critical software that will be run upon this network. There are only four times in the school year when it would be critical if this were not functioning.

Weldon is set up on sending grades out every six weeks. There are two six weeks per semester.

The software will only be upgraded during long breaks during the school year and summer. The summer break, spring break, Christmas break and Thanksgiving break will be allocated for major software or hardware upgrades. Minor issues may be done on weekends, for example some application that needs to be installed on the server.

The budget allocated for this network is $50,000. All systems deployed in this network will add to a cost of under the budget.

Weldon needs access to Internet from each classroom. Currently they have one computer in he library that has access to the Internet through a modem. This design will allow multiple access. The teachers need to be able to share data and ideas.

Project Bears (named after school mascot) will implement ideas in the best interest of all in the Weldon Independent School District.

Mission Statement

Weldon is a professional faculity that hold the up most excellence in preparing our students for the future.