1. case study: hill view montessori
charter public school
tech brief – summer2014 – v1.0
securly://

2. Case Study: Hill View Montessori Public School
Information on School
Located in Haverhill, MA, Hill View Montessori is a K-8 Charter School with a very
limited budget. The school has 306 students and 50 staff. Michael Petersen is their one
man IT team.
Information on Environment
The school has a mixed environment with about 150 devices that are split evenly
between Chromebooks and Windows laptops.
Pain-points
The school was using OpenDNS to achieve web-filtering. The status-quo suffered from
a number of drawbacks:
- The school was using the free version of OpenDNS with a limit of 20 whitelist
entries.
- YouTube for Education was not an option . As a result, YouTube was ”all or
nothing”.
- There was no way to enable Safe Search on browsers while using OpenDNS.
- Blocked pages were a frequent frustration for both teachers and for Michael.
Given that he was a one-man IT team he was not always on-site to unblock sites
upon request.
- Buying an appliance was simply not an option given the schools extremely tight
technology budget.
The Securly Solution
Securly was literally a 10 minute setup for Michael. The “set and forget” approach he
has taken gives him more time to focus on other projects. But when discipline issues do
arise, he retains the flexibility to go into the Securly dashboard and pull reports on any
user. Safe Google and YouTube EDU have been effectively implemented in the school.
Results at a Glance
- Low maintenance in-the-cloud solution.
- Delegating responsibility of web-filtering policy to tech admins and teachers.
- Safe Search and YouTube for Education.