An urban school district serving a lower-income California community, the Fresno Unified School District supports more than 73,000 students and approximately 10,000 employees. The district standardized on HP printers years ago. Now, as they look toward digitizing their environment and achieving increased efficiencies, the HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-AiO series is being installed in classrooms, with the goal of helping teachers to be more productive while reducing printing costs and maintenance needs.
“To us, this is the perfect choice," said Kurt Madden, chief technology officer, Fresno Unified School District. "The HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One meets all of our criteria for affordable, fast color printing with scanning capabilities.”
The fourth largest school district in California, Fresno has roughly 4,000 teachers across 106 schools, 66 of which are elementary schools. The majority of those teachers are required to be in the classroom all day—along with mountains of paperwork.
Fresno USD is working to move to a digital environment—lesson plans, materials and homework all add up to an enormous volume of paper. For budget, environmental and usability reasons, moving to a digitized format makes a lot of sense, so the scan-to-PC and scan-to-email capabilities of the HP Officejet Pro 8600 eAiO are widely used. “There is still a lot of paper, but with the HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One we are able to keep printing costs down while also moving toward digitizing educational materials,” said Madden.
Education demands color
Especially in elementary schools, color supports the learning process: nearly all the materials that teachers use have color to capture and engage students’ attention. The primary school also requires that teachers are in the classroom during the school day—they have limited and set periods of time to go to another location to print, copy or scan. So Fresno USD has 40% of its elementary classrooms equipped with HP AiO series. The teachers also scan students’ work and immediately make it a digital part of that student’s portfolio for the year.
Madden says the printer “is miserly with ink,” costing the district less than 1 cent per page to print. And, there is a productivity component to this feature: if a classroom printer runs out of ink, it may sit on the shelf unused because the teachers are simply too busy to deal with it. With the HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-AiO, the ink is replaced “maybe once a year.” They also save on energy usage. The district emphasizes energy efficiency and prints on both sides using the duplex features whenever possible to conserve ink and paper. “The energy efficiency of our HP solutions helps save money and the environment at the same time,” Madden explained.
Extra credit
Fresno USD simplifies management of its approximately 4,000 devices with HP Web Jetadmin and HP Universal Print Driver. Web-based software used to install, configure, troubleshoot and manage network-connected devices, HP Web Jetadmin is utilized by the district to deploy and monitor device usage and ink levels and update devices remotely. Madden says they are able to see problems and diagnose them before they send out a repairman, which improves service and efficiencies. HP Universal Print Driver is used to give end users instant access to many HP print devices without downloading separate drivers.
To further reduce costs, the district participates in the HP Self-Maintainer Program. “We do our own print management with HP Web Jetadmin and our own printer repairs trained as an HP Self-Maintainer,” Madden says. “It’s part of how HP helps us deliver the efficiency we need to provide high quality educational services.”
