St. Louis Park Schools

Only minutes from the Twin Cities and the Chain of Lakes, St. Louis Park boasts 44,000 residents, a village atmosphere, park and trails that connect to neighboring Minneapolis. St. Louis is ranked among the "100 Best Communities for Young People," and has an Independent School District with the distinction that every one of its seven schools – together serving about 4,200 K-12 students – is a National School of Excellence.

In addition, the district’s two community centers offer an extensive community education program for learners of all ages.

"We knew we would have to replace our old phone system with existing IT resources, so support services were especially important. This means that the system must be reliable and receive excellent support from a local vendor. The longevity of ShoreTel equipment also means we’re not asking taxpayers for a new system every ten years."
— Tom Marble, Director of Information Services, St. Louis Park School District

After 19 years as St. Louis Park School District director of information services, Tom Marble had the opportunity to update the district’s aging phone system. Knowing how infrequently publicly funded institutions see these opportunities, he was determined to get it right for the long haul.

After evaluating several phone systems, it was clear that ShoreTel had all the right answers, fitting the school district’s requirements perfectly.

“Not only did ShoreTel and Transcend offer the functionality we were looking for, but ShoreTel was more affordable upfront, and offered the lowest total cost of ownership over the long term. I liked the ease of management offered by ShoreTel Director that makes it simple to set up email, voicemail, and even mobile communications with a single application that’s accessible from a Web-based browser. This makes the vast amount of moves, adds and changes we have to do at the beginning of the school year much quicker and less resource intense than ever before."
— Tom Marble, Director of Information Services, St. Louis Park School District

The new ShoreTel system went live in plenty of time for district staff to become familiar with its features and capabilities before the new school year. Starting in May, the district replaced its network switches in preparation for ShoreTel deployment. The cutover to the ShoreTel system was completed during the third week of June, and two days later all the schools were on the new system. Benefits include:

• Affordable price tag met district’s fiscal responsibility requirements.
• Rich feature set that meets the needs of education staff led to easy adoption in the schools.
• Modular scalability does not require forklift upgrades, simplifying planning and budgeting.
• Centralized management lets the district’s small IT team handle needs in a timely manner, including the back-to-school surge of moves, adds, and changes.
• ShoreTel’s flexibility allows the district to meet the customized call-handling and flow requirements of different departments.

"We were thrilled to discover that over our five-year projection, ShoreTel offered $100,000 more in savings over the next most competitive solution. The icing on the cake is the fact that ShoreTel switches use less power and our overall power usage has gone down since installing the ShoreTel system. The savings in time and staff are still surprising us."
— Tom Marble, Director of Information Services, St. Louis Park School District