Case Study
A Faster, Cleaner Network Refresh: North Conejos School District
How a one-person IT department replaced an entire five-school network — roughly 20 RUCKUS switches and 50+ access points — in a matter of days, funded through E-Rate.
North Conejos School District sits in southern Colorado's San Luis Valley, serving 1,100 students and 100 staff across five schools spread across a rural valley. Its entire IT department is Brad Huffaker, and has been for 23 years. Technology is also not his only title: he is the district's CTE coordinator and its assessment coordinator, and he drives a school bus.
The district's network had reached the point where replacing pieces of it was no longer worth doing. What it needed was a full refresh, wired and wireless, across all five schools, funded through E-Rate and awarded by RFP. For a one-person department that scope is genuinely daunting: all of it specified correctly the first time, documented well enough to satisfy federal funding requirements, and none of it allowed to interrupt instruction for long. Huffaker was not shopping for hardware. He was shopping for a project that would land cleanly and not leave him with a half-finished network and four other jobs still waiting.
The RFP brought in the responses an RFP usually brings in: equipment lists priced against a specification. Pine Cove's was personalized, and it started from what the district was trying to solve rather than from a catalog. For a director who would be living with the result alone, that difference decided it.
Pine Cove mapped signal coverage across all five schools before ordering hardware, so the design answered the buildings rather than the floor plan. Roughly 20 RUCKUS switches replaced the wired core, more than 50 access points went in against the heatmap, and the whole district was installed over a few days rather than across a summer — with Pine Cove staying on to support it afterward.
"The install would definitely be ranked right up there with the very best, cleanest, quickest, and neatest installs that I've done," Huffaker says. The measure of a project like this is not the equipment list. It is whether a district with one IT person came out of a full network replacement with a working network and a director who was not buried by it. North Conejos did both.
