The School District of Grantsburg is composed of four school buildings. Three of those buildings reside on a single campus. Those buildings are the elementary, middle and high schools. The fourth building, the Nelson Primary School, is located five miles away.

The three buildings on campus are connected to each other via high‐speed fiber optic cable. The core of the campus network is located in the District Technology Center offices in the high school. From there, six pair of multi‐mode and two pair of single‐mode fiber run to each of the other two buildings on campus. Each of the other two buildings is currently connected back to the network core over 1‐Gigabit links on the single‐mode fiber.

Internet service is provided by two entities. First, we get Internet Transport (that’s the physical link to our Internet Service Provider) from TEACH over the Badgernet Converged Network (BCN). That links to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) who is Wiscnet. We currently have 63‐Megabits of Internet Transport.

The fourth building, Nelson Primary School, is not connected to the main campus network. It has a 4‐Megabit DSL connection to the internet and a small internal LAN. Nelson Primary staff have access to internet accessible services provided from the main campus such as E‐Mail, web sites and our Student Information System.

The School District of Grantsburg also has a wireless network that covers all three buildings on the primary campus. The installation of this wireless network was completed by District Technology Center staff during the summer of 2008. This is a centrally managed wireless network utilizing Cisco LightWeight access points and a Cisco Wireless LAN Controller. This allows for centralized configuration and security of the wireless network.

The wireless network was put in place because of the increasing number of staff in our buildings using laptops and also to support use of our new mobile computer labs anywhere within the buildings.

With the ever increasing numbers of mobile wireless devices (laptops, tablets, etc), we will be refreshing our wireless network to handle the increased load.

Each of the four buildings in the Grantsburg School District has their own Panasonic phone systems. Every classroom and office has at least one phone extension. The oldest of the phone systems is about 13 years. There is no set cycle for planned replacement of any of these phone systems.

All staff members and middle school and high school students are provided with a school supplied E‐Mail address. All staff and student email accounts are hosted in our Microsoft Exchange 2010 environment

The School District of Grantsburg currently operates 26 servers. These servers rovide a number of different services, including but not limited to: Active Directory Domain services, E‐Mail, web services, Student Information System, Financial, E‐Mail filtering, Web filtering, E‐Mail archiving, file serving. All servers save one, are housed in the secure server room of the District Technology Office in the high school. The one server not housed by the DTC is housed in the District Administrative Offices, also in the high school. This server serves financial software and file sharing capabilities for the District Administrative Office staff.

The servers run a mix of operating systems, including Linux, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2008.

Servers are added or replaced on an as needed basis.

The School District of Grantsburg utilized VMWare's ESXi virtualization platform to house most of our servers.

The School District of Grantsburg currently has approximately 600 computers and laptops. The majority of these are instructional computers available to teachers and students in the classrooms and labs.

Every desktop and laptop computer runs Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Windows 7 Professional. Every computer also has a copy of Microsoft Office, though the particular version will vary, depending on the age of the computer. The oldest computers have Microsoft Office 2003, while the majority of the computers currently have either Microsoft Office 2007 or Office 2010. All new computers purchased since the summer of 2011 have Microsoft Office 2010. There are currently no plans to standardize ALL district computers on the latest version of Office 2010 as the cost would be prohibitive.

Every district computer also has Anti‐Virus software installed. Our current AV product is Sophos Anti-Virus.

Many other applications are available on various district computers based on location and need. For example, one of the high school computer labs has Adobe Photoshop Elements installed for use by the Web Design and Art classes (as well as anyone else who wishes to use it). The computers in the libraries also have copies installed of many programs used for specific classes, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements used for the previously mentioned classes.

Through the Library Media Specialist and the library, many information resources are made available, such as World Book Online and other such information resources.

All district staff and all students in grades 4‐12 are issued their own usernames and passwords to login to the computers and the network and other district provided information services.

All critical data is backed up every weeknight. This includes the PowerSchool system (Student Information System), Destiny library circulation system and our financial management system.

All staff and student user home directories are backed up completely every weeknight and all staff and student common file shares are backed up three times a day with incremental backups.

All backups are currently stored on a central backup server, except for the financial system, which is backed up to tape. All backups are performed using our Unitrends backup appliance which is located in a different school building than our Data Center for disaster recovery purposes. Backups from the Unitrends appliance are then occasionally vaulted to an external hard drive to take off site.

The School District of Grantsburg is a strong supporter of Distance and Online Learning.

The district is a member of the Northern Lights ITV (Interactive Television) network based out of CESA#11. The high school has had a 1x3 ITV room since 1996, added a 1x1 ITV room in the summer of 2007, added a portable HPLL unit in 2008, and 2 CISCO video conferencing units in room 109 and 119. Our students participate in a wide range or courses including German, French, computer programming and many others.

The district also has a long history of offering students the opportunity to take online courses. The district started making opportunities for small numbers of students to take AP courses online around the 2000‐2001 school year and has expanded the online opportunities since then. The School District of Grantsburg is limited in the number and breadth of courses that we can offer. ITV and online courses allow us to offer our students course opportunities that never would have been possible otherwise.

Whenever possible, it has been the standard practice of the School District of Grantsburg to provide assistive technologies to any student (when a need for it has been identified) or if called for in an IEP. A number of our Elementary and Primary School classrooms have amplification systems so that the students can hear the teacher better. We have also completed outfitting almost every classroom with an interactive whiteboard (SmartBoard and Promethean) along with a projector in the elementary, middle and high schools. This will allow our teachers new ways of delivering content to students and increasing student interaction and engagement in the class.

We use PowerSchool from Pearson for our Student Information System (SIS). Under PowerSchool we can store much of the student information that we need. PowerSchool also handles our food service as well. PowerSchool allows for easy export of student information for import into other systems when necessary (Bus route management software, for example). 

We also use Lynx for our bussing system, Alio for district financials, Oasys for IEP management and Follet Destiny for library automation/circulation.

PowerSchool is our primary system for managing student information. It stores more than basic student demographics. It also handles scheduling, attendance, teacher grade books and allows both parents and students online access to grades.