Can you run a school on the cloud?

A school in southern Vermont (enrolling about 450 students in grades K-8) has moved their computing to the cloud. This is a particularly interesting case to me as "the cloud" seems to be all of the rage in IT circles, but many schools and organizations seem to be slow to adopt the procedures... perhaps we are being overly cautious perhaps we are too heavily invested in our current systems.

In a recent post to the list-serv for Vermont information technology, the system was described by those who set it up and manage it:

... basically we took a look at our system's capacity and assessed the needs of our clients (teachers, staff, and students....not in any particular order). The conclusion? Do everything we can to maximize our bandwidth and our networks' capacity by eliminating unnecessary traffic. The result - we no longer back up student or teacher documents. All accounts are local. We are a Google domain, so much is in the cloud. We back up only essentials - office staff, etc.. As a result, we are able to serve our school (over 400 computers, with over 200 in the hands of middle school students in a 1:1 program) with two Comcast lines providing 16 down and 2 up each. Our network consists of two Comcast SMCs, SonicWall device, old Mac Pro server, and 3 HP Pro Curve switches, and 32 Apple Airport Extremes. 

Many thanks to Keith Nemlich and Amanda Bickford from the Manchester Elementary Middle School for sharing their expertise.