Case Study: Bay State College achieves a safe return to campus with Cisco Meraki automated contact tracing

Helping students return safely to on-campus learning with automated contact tracing

Bay State College, a private four-year college in Boston, needed a way to get students—especially those in hands-on programs like nursing—safely back to campus for fall 2020 while meeting strict social‑distancing and contact‑tracing requirements. To meet this challenge the college selected Cisco Meraki, deploying Meraki MR Wireless LAN access points and a campus contact‑tracing app that would leverage wireless location data and BLE badges.

Cisco Meraki installed 40+ MR access points and integrated BLE beacons worn on lanyards, using triangulation and the Meraki cloud platform to capture over 300,000 data points per day and support 1,000+ app users. The solution automated contact tracing (eliminating hours of manual work), provided real‑time occupancy counts and compliance alerts, enabled a rapid rollout, and helped Bay State College safely resume on‑campus instruction.

Bay State College

Jefferey Meyers

Chief Information Officer