Gasconade County R-II School District is a public school district located in Owensville, MO. It has 1,801 students in grades pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.

Though the school’s original phone service vendor maintained the system and helped with troubleshooting, the school noticed static in the phone lines about a year ago. The vendor checked their outside lines and said the issue was with the system, not the phone service, but said they weren’t going to provide services for internal systems anymore and offered a list of service providers. The original vendor also no longer offered commercial phone services.

With the system being outdated, Gasconade County R-II needed to either update the system or work with a new service provider to do a complete revamp of their telecommunications system. It was decided an overhaul of the telecom system would be the best option. The school then requested and received bids from numerous vendors, including STL Communications. STL was able to determine that copper wire was causing the issue with the phone service, not the system.

Gasconade County R-II decided on a five year contract with STL Communications to replace the system and equipment, provide support, SIP and VoiP phone services.

“We reached out (to STL Communications) and they were very helpful in trying to resolve our phone issue that we were experiencing,” said Casey Fisher, Gasconade County R2’s technology director.

STL Communications The school district already had an existing Avaya IP Office solution at all schools, except Gerald Elementary. STL added an IP Office at Gerald Elementary, migrated their existing sites to “Server Edition” and refreshed/upgraded physical desk phones at all sites.

In order to maintain this system, Gasconade purchased 8×5 Preferred STL Support Services – which includes both remote and onsite support. STL also replaced their traditional phone lines with SIP Service. To do that, Gasconade’s system was upgraded to “server edition” which connects the systems at all locations and makes the administration even easier.

Now, with everything complete, Fisher is happy with the results STL Communications provided. “They provide excellent service. Our tech has been an amazing support for us as we started on this new phone system journey.” Contact STL Communications for more information at (314) 205-7100 or info@stlcom.com