RingCentral has made our faculty more accessible to students and parents, enabled our core teams to work remotely, and even helped us stay in contact with quarantined students on campus. The list of benefits we’re seeing from this solution seems endless.
Scott Heffner
Director of IT
Providing unparalleled high school education for centuries
On its list of “50 Best Boarding Schools in the United States,” TheBestSchools.org lists Phillips Exeter Academy at number one. After learning about the unique opportunities available to students attending this residential high school—which has been operating since 1781—it’s easy to understand why.
Exeter offers students a wide range of educational tracks—more than 450 courses, across 19 subject areas—built around an immersive learning experience, with a student-to-teacher ratio of just 5:1. The academy has also been called an unofficial feeder school for Harvard and other prestigious universities for decades.
The school’s commitment to educational excellence is so strong, in fact, that when they found themselves underwhelmed with the prevailing methodologies for educating young people, the team at Exeter developed their own: the Harkness method. Almost a century later, this innovative, discussion-based approach to teaching is widely used in many other boarding schools and even in colleges.
But with their campus telephony system increasingly behaving like it was as old as the school itself, Exeter’s IT team began looking for a more modern communications solution.
A communications infrastructure that required an advanced degree to manage
Scott Heffner, Exeter’s IT Director, explains that the school’s communications environment had grown organically over time and was ready for an overhaul. “We had an on-prem PBX, which was past end-of-life, a separate system for voicemail, and other solutions—each from different vendors—for call recording, call accounting, audio conferencing, and video conferencing.”
