Allegheny County's suburban school districts are casting a wider, faster net to stay on pace with technology.
Forty-one of the 42 districts in the Allegheny Intermediate Unit have agreed to join its All Connect program, a consortium aimed at building a Wide Area Network, or high-speed Internet connection.
School boards in the North Hills, Mt. Lebanon, Pine-Richland and Quaker Valley school districts are among those that approved joining the group in recent weeks.
"It will allow us to continue to expand our offerings to our students without sacrificing bandwidth," said Jeff Taylor, director of technology and instructional services at North Hills School District. "These kids want speed, or they don't want to work on it. This will give it to them."
The network will allow districts to share resources -- including videos, classroom materials and software held by the Intermediate Unit -- over connections as fast as 1,000 megabits of code per second.
"It's like taking a two-lane road and turning it into a four-lane highway -- that's what we're doing," said Sarah Zablotsky, spokeswoman for the Intermediate Unit. "All of those dreams folks had with Internet technology are becoming a reality."
The program is funded by a $2.35 million state E-Fund grant through the governor's office and the Educational Technology Fund, which is funded by telecommunications organizations such as Verizon and Comcast. Allegheny County is the last of the state's 29 Intermediate Units to come on board, Zablotsky said.
Pittsburgh Public Schools are not part of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit and has its own network connecting its 65 schools. It would be included in All Connect when all of the units across the state are linked together.
The decision to join has been a struggle for some districts, including Allegheny Valley, which opted out.
Mt. Lebanon has a more cost-efficient deal with Comcast, however, Superintendent John Allison said he believes students will be best served with All Connect.
"Everybody was at a different place with different capabilities, so we had to ask what is the educational impact," Allison said. "As we move forward, this is the world our kids are going to live in, that they're going to function in. It's a world that we don't know what it's going to look like 15 years from now, but this is going to be an avenue and part of the way they're going to operate."
All Connect will move into its first 18 districts in the fall, with an additional 14 districts to be added in the fall of 2009.
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