Case Study: Arbor Park School District achieves enhanced network visibility and proactive issue resolution with Cisco Meraki

Keeping schools up and running when your IT team is lean

Arbor Park School District, serving about 1,300 students and 210 staff across four schools and a transportation center, faced a network with little client visibility and limited IT staff (four people) to manage security and troubleshooting. Chief Technology Officer David Termunde selected Cisco Meraki and deployed an MX250 security appliance to provide a simple, centrally managed solution that met the district’s needs for visibility, ease of use, and CIPA-compliant content filtering.

Using the Cisco Meraki MX250 (preconfigured in the Meraki dashboard), the district replaced a firewall, router, and switch with a single appliance supporting all five locations over the WAN and was up and running in about 1.5 hours. The MX immediately populated client devices, helped the team identify three bottlenecks in the first week, enabled traffic shaping and group policies for state testing, and consolidated intrusion/malware alerts so the lean IT team could proactively remediate issues. The district also added Meraki MS switches to monitor servers (even alerting staff when the HVAC controller went offline), eliminated duplicate endpoint protection, and is planning broader Meraki expansion—demonstrating measurable improvements in visibility, uptime, and operational efficiency.

Arbor Park School District

David Termunde

Chief Technology Officer