> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.bitsinflight.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Networking for Schools and Colleges
- URL: https://www.bitsinflight.com/networking-for-schools-and-colleges-telemetry-now/
- Published: 2025-06-18T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-16T15:59:31.000Z
- Description: Telemetry Now on SLED networking with Phil Gervasi and Laketec's Philip Wightman. E-Rate, one-person IT departments, why K-12 networks are not as simple as people assume, and the automation we were building for the summer refresh season.
- Author: Jason Gintert
- Tags: media, podcast, Kentik, Laketec, network automation

*Telemetry Now, Season 2 Episode 48\. Published 18 June 2025\. Host: Phil Gervasi of Kentik, with my Laketec colleague Philip Wightman.*

Phil spent years at northeast VARs doing school district projects, so this was partly a reunion. He had me on a couple of months into the Laketec role to talk about state, local and education networking, better known as SLED, and I brought Philip Wightman, who has been doing this work in Ohio for a decade, as my wingman.

## Doing a lot with a little

What struck me first about K-12 was how much schools are expected to do with the staff and money they have. Often it is one IT director wearing every hat, and their expertise might be servers or voice rather than the network. Regulation keeps piling on. Content filtering and segmentation between faculty and students are mandatory, not optional. And the student experience has become a selling point, especially for colleges competing for enrollment. People look down on school networks as simple. Some are. Many are not, once you add access control, one access point per classroom, Apple TVs and the mDNS gymnastics that go with them, dorms full of Alexas, and school buses with LTE routers.

## E-Rate

The federal program that funds most of this. In Ohio, the discount tracks the district's free and reduced lunch percentage, so a district at 90% gets 90% of its gear paid for, which means some of the poorest areas around Cleveland get technology they could never budget for. The rules are strict: category one for internet access, category two for internal connections and managed internal broadband services, and specific limits on what can plug into what. NAC is not E-Rate eligible, for instance. I had heard of SPIN numbers before I arrived; I had no idea how many layers there were until I watched our account team navigate it. The other quirk Phil loved: the cutover window starts at 3:30 when the buses leave, not at midnight.

## What we were automating

Phil asked the honest question of whether automation makes sense for a VAR that does not own day two. My answer came from the previous company, where COVID lead times forced us to pre-build everything so gear could be deployed the day it landed. At Laketec we were building a tool to pull configs from existing Cisco or Aruba switches, normalize them and map them onto the Aruba CX switches going in, so nobody has to dig through every one-off port by hand. Longer term, a network source of truth like NetBox or Infrahub, configs generated from the model, and zero-touch provisioning to stand devices up. Philip was already deploying a district that week without going on site: switches pre-provisioned, contractors doing the physical work, uplinks monitored remotely. Summer is our busy season, twelve schools that year, and the point is getting them done cleanly in the window.

## What the projects look like

Core, aggregation and access refreshes, Wi-Fi 7 upgrades, UPS and PDU work because nobody has checked the batteries in five years, and, when we get to evangelize it, centralized overlays where every switch port is identical and NAC decides where the client lands. Voice is still real: a classroom phone that can dial 911 is a requirement in many jurisdictions, even as the rest of the campus moves to Teams. Universities we all agreed are enterprises in everything but the funding line. The three of us ended where Phil started: it is rewarding work, because the effort goes toward educating kids.

[Listen on Telemetry Now →](https://www.kentik.com/telemetrynow/s02-e48/?ref=bitsinflight.com)