The Network Is Part Of The Classroom At This Staten Island School

For years, educational technology has been treated as an add-on to schools. Architects build the buildings, and then IT staff bring in laptops, tablets, smartboards, learning management systems, and Wi-Fi. At New World Preparatory Charter School on Staten Island , Cisco and its partners are testing a more fundamental proposition: what happens when the network becomes a pervasive part of the building itself?

New World Prep is a K-8 charter school serving roughly 800 students in a community where more than 90% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and where educational opportunity has often been lacking. The school hopes to address this challenge by emphasizing academic rigor, personalization, and family engagement as core to its mission. "The goal is to create the best environment we can for them when they come to school. When you walk into a building, what's the first thing that hits you?" Angelo Aponte, the Chairman of the Board of the school, asks. "It's lighting and air. You breathe it." Cleaner air and better-tuned lighting, in his telling, have already paid off with reduced absenteeism and greater student engagement.

The technical foundation of New World Prep's approach to rethinking its building is Power over Ethernet (PoE), which delivers DC power over copper Ethernet cabling, eliminating the need for separate power supplies and outlets. Higher-power PoE standards enable LED lighting, occupancy sensors, cameras, monitors, and window shades to run over the network. At New World Prep, the implementation is unusually ambitious for a K-8 building. According to MHT Technologies' case study , the school installed 1,081 PoE-powered lighting fixtures, 541 PoE node drivers, 25 Cisco 24-port PoE switches, 256 occupancy sensors, and 140 smart wall switches, all centrally monitored through MHT's Inspextor software. The result is a physical space where everything from the amount of light to the temperature of the light to the mix of natural and artificial light to the airflow within the room can be optimized to meet student needs.

Bob Cicero, Cisco's America's Future-Proofed Workplace Director, describes the underlying shift in plain terms. "The network is often equated with connectivity, with data, with just connecting and controlling, but now it's energy," he says. Cisco's smart-building guidance shows how lighting and other building systems can converge on a single IP network and be managed alongside power, gas, and water, in what is effectively "a fourth utility."

Once a school can sense, power, and manage its physical environment through the network, the classroom stops being just a room where instruction happens and starts reporting on itself. Details on occupancy, temperature, lighting, and system performance are readily available on dashboards and in summary reports. Aponte says the platform has moved his school from reacting to anticipating. He gets feedback "on every single square foot of the building, every classroom" and can adjust before a problem affects the student-teacher relationship.

Benefits and Concerns

The challenges with any flood of information are twofold. One needs to figure out how to use it productively and safeguard it so that it benefits students without inducing a sense of constant observation. Aponte compares what is possible to the logic of detailed data collection in instruction. "When 15 of 22 students miss the same question on an assessment," Aponte says, "the platform helps a teacher quickly distinguish individual misunderstanding from a flaw in the lesson or the test item itself." The challenge is to find similar ways for information from the space itself to provide insight into the learning process. New World Prep's implementation points toward a constructive model in which they use the network to remove friction, support health and safety, and surface early signals before small problems grow.

New World Prep is at the start of its journey, but it is already generating enthusiasm among the wider community. A high school teacher at a nearby school recently told Aponte that she had never seen students better prepared for high school than those coming out of his classrooms; she added that she wanted her own son to attend New World Prep. When your colleagues react this way, it is clear something is going right at the school. Aponte cites another telling sign that something special is happening at the school: at the end of the day, his students often want to stay rather than leave.

For Cicero, the deeper lesson is how technology gets into a building in the first place. "Technology has to be designed in," he says. "It can't just be thought of as a screen we hang on the wall afterward, or as where the wireless access point is going to go." Unless you design the technology in from the beginning, you inevitably wind up with something suboptimal. The future of educational technology, in Cisco's view, may not be another app or screen. Sometimes it is the wire behind the wall, the sensor in the ceiling, and the ability for teachers and students to just grab a Cat5 cable and plug in without worrying about where the power cords are, whether there are enough laptops, whether the charging cart is working, and all the ways technology fails students today. With the network becoming a fourth utility, pervasive throughout the building, it may finally be possible to get the IT infrastructure out of the way so that educators can focus on teaching and students can focus on learning.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com