Lynchburg City Schools

The school division has a Metropolitan-Area Network (MAN) allowing personnel at all schools to access outside resources quickly and cost-effectively. In cooperation with the City of Lynchburg, the Lynchburg City Schools maintains a city-wide fiber optic network backbone to connect most of the school division’s sites. Other sites are connected to the network through a dedicated Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connection. The MAN consists of:

• multiple fiber optic rings for redundancy
• fiber gigabit links between all backbone nodes
• gigabit fiber spurs connect sites not on the backbone
• Cisco equipment-based layer 3 switching which allows Internet Protocol (IP) routing, Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), Quality of Service (QOS), Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), etc.

The following sites are connected to the city’s fiber optic backbone with a direct fiber connection to each site: Bass Elementary, Bedford Hills Elementary, Dearington Elementary, Heritage Elementary, Linkhorne Elementary, Thomas C. Miller Elementary, Robert S. Payne Elementary, Paul Munro Elementary, Perrymont Elementary, Sandusky Elementary, Sheffield Elementary, Hutcherson Early Learning Center, Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School, Linkhorne Middle School, Sandusky Middle School, E.C. Glass High School, Heritage High School, Pride Alternative Center, Governor’s School, Laurel Regional School, Transportation, and the School Administration Building. 

The following sites connect to the fiber optic network through a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) (768 K) connection: Pride Plus / Middle School Learning Center, Adult Learning Center, and numerous recreational centers and school partners. As part of the negotiations on the purchase of the city network, Ntelos agreed to provide up to 18 DSL connections to sites identified by the school division. These sites would be in partnership with the school division and would house after school tutorial programs. The DSL connection will allow these sites to access instructional software at the schools.
The school division and city share a single Internet connection that allows for centralized access into and out of the network. This Metro Ethernet Circuit (50 Mbs) is protected by an enterprise grade firewall appliance that incorporates firewall features, intrusion detection, event monitoring, content filtering, antivirus scanning, and Virtual Private Network (VPN) support. Web and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access are controlled by a proxy server that uses list based technology to filter inappropriate content. A centralized connection to the Internet allows a hardware firewall to exist at one site for more effective monitoring. The firewall decreases the possibility of students accessing inappropriate sites on the Internet. Equipment at the central sites is also standardized so that costs and personnel can be shared by the city and the school division.