Case Study: McLean County School District 5 achieves secure remote learning for 4,300 students and stops thousands of threats with Palo Alto Networks

Four Thousand New Security Risks Just Left School

McLean County School District 5 in Illinois needed to secure a growing one-to-one laptop program and support 4,300 remote student users (part of a district serving 13,500 students) with a 10-person IT staff. The district faced bandwidth constraints, frequent malware and phishing infections, CIPA compliance requirements, and an expensive, hard-to-manage VPN solution that couldn’t effectively protect devices off campus.

By leveraging existing PA-2050 firewalls with Palo Alto Networks WildFire and GlobalProtect, the district added cloud-based sandboxing, advanced threat prevention, and a VPN that forces traffic back through the datacenter with consistent filtering and policies. The deployment immediately stopped phishing and unknown threats (WildFire identified ~5,000 threats), replaced legacy antivirus, saved $25,000 up front plus $6,500 annually, reduced IT workload, preserved bandwidth, ensured off-site CIPA compliance, and enabled secure printing and remote camera access while preparing for further device rollouts.

McLean County School District 5

Justin Lightfoot

Network Administrator