Chesterfield County Public Schools Engineers Solution to Pandemic Problem with Citrix®

COVID-19 has forced schools around the world to think outside the box when it comes to educating students. And Chesterfield County Public Schools (CCPS) has risen to the occasion. Leveraging digital workspace solutions from  Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), the  district is providing the more than 5,000 students enrolled in its Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs with secure and reliable access to the systems and software they need to excel while learning remote.

“Meeting the needs of all students during the pandemic required Chesterfield Schools to identify a solution to extend specialized computer-based learning to the home environment,” said Brian Jones, Executive Director of Technology Services, CCPS. “Waiting until students could return to their CTE labs was not an option.”

A Flexible Approach

But the district realized it would face some unique challenges in finding the right offering. The STEM-based curriculum taught as part of the district’s CTE programs relies heavily on memory and compute-intensive software run on CAD stations set up in labs across 12 schools.

“This isn’t software that can be loaded onto your average PC,” said Achim Purdy, Network Manager, CCPS. “And without access to the high-powered machines on which it is run, students can’t effectively learn.”

Facing the same plight, many districts across the country opted to suspend their STEM programs until students can return to classrooms fulltime. CCPS chose a different route.

A Powerful Solution

Like the more than 400,000 companies around the world using Citrix digital workspace solutions to power the flexible work models that COVID-19 demands, the  district chose to implement Citrix® Virtual Apps and Desktops™ Service and Citrix Remote PC Access™ to deliver a familiar virtual desktop from which CTE students can safely access all the resources they need to learn and a high-performance experience that enables them to excel from home.

And in less than two weeks, it had achieved its goal.

“With Citrix, students can quickly and easily connect to the CAD stations they use in our labs from their school-issued Chromebooks” Purdy said. “Everything looks the same and is delivered in a reliable way so they can just focus and do their best work.”

CCPS joins hundreds of educational institutions using Citrix solutions to power a better way to learn. To find out more about these solutions and the value they can deliver, visit: https://www.citrix.com/solutions/education/

About CCPS

Chesterfield County Public Schools is the public school system of Chesterfield County, Virginia and serves more than 63,000 students across 39 elementary schools (grades K-5), 12 middle schools (grades 6-8), and 11 high schools (grades 9-12.) Additionally, high school students can enroll in 13 specialty centers, two technical centers, and two Governor's Schools. For more information, visit https://mychesterfieldschools.com

About Citrix

Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is powering a better way to work with unified workspace, networking, and analytics solutions that help organizations unlock innovation, engage customers, and boost productivity, without sacrificing security. With Citrix, users get a seamless work experience and IT has a unified platform to secure, manage, and monitor diverse technologies in complex cloud environments. Citrix solutions are in use by more than 400,000 organizations including 98 percent of the Fortune 500.