The Fontana Unified School District is proud to announce that we have entered into a unique partnership with Cisco, a leader in telecommunications solutions. Through this partnership, our district will become the first school district in the entire country to implement Cisco’s higher end units of their high definition video conferencing solution, TelePresence.

At the July 15, 2009 Board Meeting, Randy Bassett, Chief Technology Officer, and Kyle Larick, Cisco Account Manager, presented information about this new partnership to the Board of Education. As Mr. Bassett explained, “TelePresence uses life sized, high definition video and spatial audio to create a live, face-to-face communication experience over a computer network.”

Cisco is providing FUSD with six of their higher end TelePresense units: one 6-user unit for the District Office and five 18-user units, one for each of our comprehensive high schools (A.B. Miller, Fontana, Kaiser, Summit, and Jurupa Hills, which is currently under construction). The total cost of the services and equipment being provided by Cisco is valued in excess of $2 million.

Mr. Bassett continued, “We can already see applications in the area of collaboration between school sites – reducing costs related to employee travel time, connections between classrooms, professional development, Career Technical Education, and virtual field trips. All of this relates back to collaboration.”

Superintendent Cali-Olsen Binks was one of a small contingency from FUSD who recently participated in a TelePresence demo at Cisco. She elaborated, “The people really do feel like they are in the room with you. It offers a great opportunity for collaboration between department chairs, athletic directors, principals. People can go to ‘hub sites’ and they won’t have to travel over the freeway, which can take up to an hour or even an hour and a half, so there is such a loss of time. There are often times that we don’t have conference rooms available and this gives us the opportunity to let people go to one of the high schools instead.”

As Mr. Larick explained, Cisco chose Fontana for this partnership because we have been a leader in educational technology. He said, “In offering this partnership to Fontana, it provides Cisco an opportunity to showcase this technology and what can be done using these high end video collaboration tools. While very popular in corporate America, Fontana will be the first school district within the United States, or abroad for that matter, to implement this technology at this level. And that’s exciting.”

Superintendent Cali Olsen-Binks agreed, “It really is a great opportunity that Cisco is allowing Fontana to be back on the cutting edge."

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