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HIGHER EDUCATION

A Pennsylvania school district learns why PaperCut is the perfect solution for Chromebook printing

Cutting to the chase

Problem

Thousands of students and hundreds of staff needed a print management system.


Solution

PaperCut makes printing from Chromebooks easy and efficient


Outcome

Easy implementation, greater reporting visibility, and more control than before.

The Dallastown Area School District (DASD) is located in York County, 34 miles south of Harrisburg, in the south-central part of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The DASD is made up of six schools across seven buildings serving more than 6,400 students, with over 500 teachers and 350 support staff.

John Lenhart is the DASD SysAdmin and introduced Google Workspace for Education as the foundation for the district’s IT system. “I absolutely love it,” John says. “They just keep adding more and more features, and it’s all free for schools. I can’t stress my appreciation for the product enough.”

In fact, in his first year as SysAdmin, he helped bring 2,000 Chromebooks into the intermediate school. But with that came the need for a robust print management system that could handle the needs of both students and staff.

“Within 10 minutes all of our Chromebooks had it… I didn’t deal with a single Chromebook printing issue all year.”"

- John Lenhart,

Dallastown Area School District SysAdmin, Pennsylvania, USA

Problem

With thousands of students that span a wide range of ages and technology experience, it was vital that the district’s printing solution was easy to use. It was also important that DASD got a better understanding of exactly who was doing what printing.

Previously, there had been an issue with their print management, where all students could see every printer all over the district and print something out anywhere. There had been occasions where kids were sending joke printouts all over the place and there was no way of tracking who was responsible.

Solution

PaperCut has long been popular with the education sector because it meets a lot of needs. And, because PaperCut has a proven track record of working well with Chromebooks, it was the obvious choice to be used by DASD.

A key feature of PaperCut is the software’s Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) feature, Mobility Print. This makes it simple for users to print from any device – laptop, smartphone, iPad, tablet, and more. Instead of having to install drivers on multiple devices, PaperCut made integration seamless and allows users to print from any device to any brand of printer.

For John, Mobility Print helped him in several ways. It allowed him to set up a print environment that worked flawlessly with the district’s fleet of Chromebooks. It gave him much greater access to data so he could see what printing was being done and by whom. And it made it possible to add restrictions that prevented users from sending jobs to school printers when they were off campus.

“We can finally see what our true student printing looks like. And what we’ve discovered is that students haven’t been the problem all these years – the staff actually do the bulk of the printing,” John reveals.

Outcome

With PaperCut taking care of printing for the entire school district, John was able to spend more time putting DASD at the forefront of educational digitization. Each year, he handpicks 100 sixth-grade students to turn into the Delta Team. They receive customized training to become the first port of call for any other students having IT issues. They’ll troubleshoot Chromebook or WiFi problems as well as helping students use the Google for Education tools. By bringing expertise in-house, the district has reduced the need for additional support. “We had one technician handling the whole building – and he was just there to make repairs,” explained John.

Meanwhile PaperCut provides the district with much better insights into how to embrace a digital future. Now John can see improvement happening in real time. “It’s a credit to the students and teachers for going more paperless – and something we can finally report on since we integrated Mobility Print.”

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