Case Study
Network Confidence and Reliability: Mountainland Head Start
How a lean non-profit serving 900 families across 13 locations replaced a clunky, unreliable network with RUCKUS wireless, new switching, and a Sophos firewall — and learned to run it themselves.
Mountainland Head Start promotes school readiness for nearly 900 students and employs 200 staff across 13 locations in Utah, Juab, and Wasatch counties. Head Start organizations are accountable in ways a private school is not: enrollment, attendance, health screenings, and family engagement all have to be recorded and reported, and nearly all of that reporting happens online. A slow network does not just frustrate a teacher — it delays the paperwork the program's funding depends on.
The old network was clunky, slow, and unreliable, in the specific way that wears a staff down: not broken enough to be an emergency, just unpredictable enough that nobody quite trusted it. Teachers built workarounds. Administrators assumed a task would take two attempts. Across 13 sites, that lost time compounds into hours every week.
Fixing it meant confronting two real constraints at once: a lean non-profit budget with no room for an oversized solution, and an entire IT department of two people covering 13 sites. IT Lead and Data Manager Aaron Perkins came into the project apprehensive — the honest reaction of anyone about to re-cable their own organization. After talking it through with Pine Cove, he chose RUCKUS wireless access points and switching alongside a new Sophos firewall.
Pine Cove replaced the wireless, the switching, and the firewall in one coordinated pass across all 13 locations, with Pine Cove's project team handling the rollout site by site so the work did not land on a two-person department. Then Pine Cove trained Mountainland's team to run the new environment themselves — which was the point of the whole exercise.
"Pine Cove exceeded all expectations," Perkins says. "I was nervous for the project. Their team made me feel confident and the results have been great." Speed and reliability improved so plainly that staff stopped describing the network in degrees and started describing it as night and day. Because the team was trained to manage the environment rather than handed a black box, day-to-day changes stay in house and Pine Cove stays available for the work that genuinely needs a specialist.
