Central Valley School District's relationship with DES beyond buying products, services

MONACA, Pa. — A trusted technology integrator and provider of communication solutions for education customers, Dagostino Electronic Services has a long partnership with the Central Valley School District.

The Central Valley School District serves about 2,400 students in Beaver County. In this picture, Central Valley High School is shown with an exterior security camera. 

The Central Valley School District is a merged district created in 2009 from the Center Area and Monaca school districts in Beaver County, northwest of Pittsburgh. Approximately 2,400 students attend classes in the district’s four buildings and there are about 300 staff members.

DES’ relationship began with the Center Area School District in 2000 with the installation of one of North America’s first IP-based phone systems.

Since then, DES has designed and installed everything from data and wireless networks to security, voice and audiovisual systems.

“I keep coming back to DES because of the relationships I have with the employees,” Director of Technology Edward Eimiller explained. “I find them to be honest and trustworthy. They have a general desire to fix the problem, when there is a one, correctly and accurately. I’ve never had a problem of getting somebody on site to fix the issue.”

Dagostino also provides multiple levels of support to the district, holding regular meetings with school leaders to assess current and future needs.

“We’ve used [DES] as a partner to consult on the upgrades for the district, to develop long-term plans and to make them financially feasible,” Eimiller said.

Those plans include product replacement cycles. DES alerts Central Valley when products such as switches, access points, firewalls or phones are coming to end of life.

“They help us put together plans to make it affordable for us to replace things,” Eimiller explained. “They send us periodic reminders that certain updates need to be done or backups need to be done, and a lot of times they’ll just do that for us.”

He continued, “We try to be as proactive as possible, and that’s one of the things Dagostino offers is proactive planning, to make sure that we’re not in a situation where we’re trying to maintain older equipment.”

Since school districts don’t typically employ network engineers, having a partnership with a company like Dagostino is invaluable.

Eimiller said, “When you find a company that employs quality people, that will go out of their way to help you figure out what the best plan is for you and not necessarily what is most profitable for them, that’s a relationship you hold onto.”

He concluded, “I can’t think of another company that I’ve dealt with in the past that I’ve had this type of relationship with and I would recommend them to anybody that is looking for any services relating to data, voice or video.”