CallTower and Cisco Partner to Help Santa Clara Unified School District Communicate Efficiently and Effectively
The District
The Santa Clara Unified School District in Northern California serves 15,000 K-12 students and an additional 15,000 students in adult school.
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The Challenge
Mary Phillips, Director of Information Technology of the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD), California, had a vision to help the school district communicate more effectively and efficiently through Unified Communications. The vision included an IP-based communications system that met the needs of staff, students, parents and others who wanted information to be timely and complete, delivered by phone, email and the Web.
“The goal is to save staff time so they can concentrate their efforts on the needs of our students,” said Phillips. “In a school district, it is imperative that multiple forms of communication are readily available due to the unique needs of our clientele. Unified Communications helps us fulfill these needs.”
The district sought to replace its old phone system with a solution that allowed it to:
- Improve connections among teachers, administrators, students and parents
- Facilitate better team interactions
- Extend district applications and communications to mobile devices
- Pave the way for distance learning, particularly with video
“We wanted all of the applications and features of UC but needed to contain costs. We also wanted to transition the district from a CapEx model to an OpEx model,” explained Phillips. “Our goal was to get more for our money and we saw little benefit in owning and maintaining our own equipment. We knew we wanted a hosted VoIP service based on the Cisco Unified Communications Manager along with Cisco IP Phones. We were pleased to learn that hosted VoIP and UC solutions are now eligible for eRate Priority 1 funding.”
Hosted UC Maximizes Priority 1 eRate Funding
CallTower and Cisco have teamed up to find innovative ways to deliver UC solutions to schools across the country through the Schools and Libraries Program, also known as eRate. ERate’s goals are to provide discounted telecommunications, Internet access and internal connections to eligible schools and libraries, providing cost savings and relief from antiquated technologies. Utilizing CallTower’s Priority 1-eligible Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) allows districts to upgrade technology through convergence without capital expenditures from the general fund.
The Solution
Once Phillips discovered the district would be able to take advantage of a hosted Unified Communications solution through the eRate program, she identified and researched potential service providers. CallTower quickly rose to the top in terms of meeting product, pricing and implementation requirements. CallTower’s On Demand Unified Communications solution provides organizations with enterprise-class reliability, a single point of support, network options, productivity-enhancing features, redundancy and 24/7 service for a fixed monthly fee. Built on Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager, CallTower’s telephony package includes all the latest phones and features, as well as the full unified messaging voicemail system.
Features include:
- Secure hosted VoIP over private internet connection
- Find Me/Follow Me: One number to reach users anywhere
- Voice-to-Text: Voicemail transcribed and delivered to your email inbox
- Fax to Email: Fax messages delivered to your email inbox.
The Results
For SCUSD, the advantages of CallTower’s on demand UC are clear: The district is simplifying a service and support model that allows management to closely approximate what they were spending on supporting their older, less capable system. Sixty-three percent of the solution was funded through eRate.
“SCUSD is spending roughly the same but getting a vastly superior service fully managed by CallTower.” Said Philips. “The whole UC experience exists within CallTower’s network–call control, control for email, video, presence — none has to be managed by the district.”
“Every implementation has its bumps and challenges. However, CallTower has gone above and beyond in terms of its responsiveness and the outstanding service and support we have received every step along the way,” concludes Phillips. “We need to have our vendors be responsive, and CallTower has been extremely responsive, reliable and has exhibited the utmost integrity throughout the entire implementation.”
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