Case Study: Paulding County School District achieves scalable, secure Wi‑Fi for 30,000+ simultaneous devices with Fortinet

High Volume of Wi-Fi Traffic and Lean Staff Make Fortinet the Right Provider for Georgia School District

Paulding County School District, a 32,000‑student district in Dallas, Georgia, faced tight budgets and a very lean IT team (six networking/security staff) while supporting heavy wireless use from one‑to‑one student device programs and up to 30,000 simultaneous connections. Legacy firewalls and mixed vendor networking gear created bottlenecks, limited visibility, and increased operational burden, making scalable, high‑performance security and easier management a priority.

The district consolidated on Fortinet—deploying FortiGate NGFWs with FortiGuard UTP, FortiSwitch, FortiAP, FortiClient, FortiVoice and management tools—which delivered high‑performance web filtering, VLAN segmentation, certificate‑based Wi‑Fi and port‑level control. Centralized management and shared FortiOS tooling cut the learning curve, enabled 80–90% of incident responses to be handled remotely, improved uptime and security, and lowered total cost of ownership by letting a small team manage more of the network.

Paulding County School District

Julie Ragsdale

Chief Information Officer