Name
Modernizing Campus Communications
Date & Time
Thursday, November 12, 2026, 10:00 AM - 10:45 AM
Speakers
Description
Somewhere on your campus right now, a teacher is walking between buildings — unreachable. An SRO is responding to an incident, and the front office has no idea where they are. A parent is calling a copper-line extension that rings to an empty classroom while the instructor is supervising recess on the other side of the facility. The phone system that was installed a decade (or two) ago was designed for a world where every employee sat at a desk. That world no longer exists in K–12 education.
According to recent data, approximately 99,000 U.S. schools still depend on aging telephony infrastructure — some of it running on copper POTS lines that carriers are actively sunsetting. The FCC's March 2026 deadline accelerated the retirement of legacy copper circuits. Meanwhile, coaches, counselors, SROs, itinerant staff, and teachers move from building to building all day. The gap between where communication happens and where people actually are has never been wider.
This session tackles the problem head-on. We will examine what it really means to modernize campus communications — not just swapping a PBX for a cloud service, but rethinking how a district connects every person, every building, and every workflow under a single, mobile-first platform.
Attendees will explore:
- The mobility imperative. How cloud-based telephony follows the person, not the desk — giving every staff member a consistent work identity (voice, SMS, voicemail) on any device, anywhere on campus or off, without exposing personal phone numbers.
- Safety and compliance. How modern platforms address Kari's Law and RAY BAUM's Act requirements for direct 911 dialing and dispatchable location data, how calls can be simultaneously forked to on-campus SROs and external dispatch, and how Alyssa's Law silent-alert capabilities integrate with existing safety plans.
- AI-powered administration. How artificial intelligence is changing the daily experience of phone management — from voicemail transcription and prioritization to call summaries with automatic next-step extraction, live translation for multilingual family engagement, and intelligent virtual receptionists that can answer parent inquiries, route calls, and even process attendance reports after hours.
- Disaster recovery and continuity. How cloud architectures with local survivability nodes keep campus communications operational even during internet outages — a scenario that legacy PBX systems handle poorly, if at all.
- Real-world deployment stories. Examples from districts that have already made the transition, including how they handled licensing, training, phased rollouts across dozens of buildings, and integration with existing tools like SIS platforms, LMS systems, and emergency notification services.
This session is not a product pitch. It is a practitioner-led conversation grounded in the reality that the phone system is the lifeline of every school — and that lifeline must work the way educators actually work in 2026: on the move, across buildings, and always accountable to the families and communities they serve.
Key Takeaways:
- Identify the operational, safety, and compliance challenges your district faces by remaining on legacy telephony infrastructure, and build a framework for evaluating cloud-based alternatives.
- Understand how mobile-first communication platforms can close the connectivity gap for staff who move between buildings, campuses, and off-site locations throughout the day.
- Learn how AI-driven features — from intelligent call routing to virtual receptionists and automated call documentation — can reduce administrative burden and improve responsiveness to families without adding headcount.
Location Name
Crowne Hotel- Victoria Station D
Full Address
Crowne Plaza Indianapolis
123 W Louisiana St
Indianapolis, IN 46225
United States
123 W Louisiana St
Indianapolis, IN 46225
United States
Level
Intermediate
Tags
Technical, Leadership