When Cindy Landers became Business Manager at HRSD, she immediately faced a technology challenge that confronts many rural school districts. She had to find an affordable way to connect multiple, remote school buildings to the district's critical central information system. Somehow, staff  in all locations had to be able to connect to an enterprise-wide resource management system to manage budgets, to purchase goods and services, and to access other on-demand operational data.
 
HRSD is located in a hilly region north west of Springfield, MA, with school buildings in five different towns. None of these locations were networked or connected to the central office, which is located at the high school. As a result, individual building administrators rarely had access to up-to-date information when they needed it. Principals had to call the business office for current budget status reports, which they would have to pick up at the high school - sometimes days later. Often, they made operational decisions based on status reports that were weeks out of date.
 
According to Cindy, "The solution to our dilemma was to find a web-based system, because each buildings had Internet access through e-Rate funding, but the cost of installing dedicated lines to each of our five remote buildings would have been prohibitive." Wide area network (WANs) projects for an entity like HRSD can typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
 
Cindy took action; she issued a detailed request for proposals (RFP), and evaluated solutions from several vendors. After a comprehensive search and review of differing approaches to the problem, Cindy's team awarded the system contract to UniFund to implement  BudgetSense and its web-based browser application, WebSense. UniFund and HRSD immediately went to work on the project implementation to achieve Cindy's teams' objectives to connect into one system in order to save time and money.
 
Fast forward, two years. 
 
Hampshire Regional is now a showcase of technical efficiency. With WebSense as the vehicle, HRSD now delivers real-time data access to every school principal, secretary and department head with high speed direct internet connections at each school, or at staff member's homes. The district is now paperless for all purchasing transactions, principals have real-time access to budget information when they need it, and the district is on a single, centralized system.
 
As Cindy Landers puts it: "WebSense has helped put us on a real-time basis. All of our administrators know exactly what funds they have left, and when they issue a purchase requisition, the money is committed instantly, avoiding any unpleasant surprises. We have a tight lock on avoiding over-expenditures, thanks to UniFund."
 
Congratulations to Cindy and the entire team at Hampshire Regional Schools; you've achieved an innovative solution that works - and you are that much closer to your target of peak performance.