When Brenna Clinton talks about what E-rate means to Greenwood Independent School District, she does not reach for policy language. She talks about the internet in two brand-new campuses that open this August, and what would happen without it.
“Without E-rate, I would not have internet at that new building,” she said. “It wouldn’t be possible.”
Brenna is the technology coordinator at Greenwood, a district that has grown at a pace most people would not believe. She shared her story at a recent Funds For Learning Summit session, in a conversation with Sheauna Brown.
A community built around one school
Greenwood sits in the middle of cotton fields, outside any city limits. There is no grocery store and no post office. There is a school, and a community built around it. “We blew up really fast,” Brenna said. When COVID hit, the district had roughly 250 Chromebooks. Within a year, like so many districts, it went one-to-one for every student. That meant new access points, and new switches to feed them, layered on top of a network that had never been built for growth like this.
A Greenwood ISD (GISD) district event. The construction theme fits a district that has been building fast to keep up with its growth.
The night eight switches went down
Brenna did not set out to run all of it. She is a certified teacher who spent seven years in the classroom before her superintendent asked her to bridge the gap between the teachers and the IT side. This is only her second year as technology coordinator. Her first real test came in November 2024, when the main equipment room at the elementary school went down and eight switches had to be replaced almost overnight. With no dedicated network person on staff, she was paying for the hardware, the labor, and the configuration all at once.
That invoice landing on the superintendent’s desk changed the conversation. “Where do we go from here?” he asked. “What does our plan need to be?”
Brenna was honest about where things stood. “I knew what our network was, and I’m going to be real honest. It was trash.” Old switches had been patched over and around for years as the district raced to keep up. The plan became to replace the core equipment, starting with the high school, which feeds everything else on campus.
Going into her first E-rate cycle, she was, in her own words, petrified. “I couldn’t even tell you fully what E-rate was at the time.” She learned. Two years in, she can answer questions she once had to look up.
Two new campuses, and no budget to connect them
The growth has not slowed. The district passed a bond and is opening a new elementary and a new intermediate campus about eight miles down the road. Because the technology was left out of the original construction budget, Brenna had to find another way to connect them, including running fiber roughly ten miles from the high school. She is now managing a Category One project and a Category Two project at the same time, ordering switches for the new campuses while still replacing equipment at the existing ones.
The stakes, the way she describes them, are not abstract. These are K-2 and 3-5 campuses with 18 classrooms per grade level.
“Without internet you don’t have access control, you don’t have cameras, you don’t have anything but paper and a pencil, and we don’t live in that world anymore.” – Brenna Clinton, Technology Coordinator, Greenwood ISD
More is coming. The high school is being renovated and expanded, with a new student event center that will give the district its first real gym and auditorium. The original 1918 building will become administration and daycare space. Brenna planned her Category Two procurement with all of it in mind. “I kind of used my next five years of budget all in one swoop,” she said, “knowing what we have coming.”
Asked how the district would plan for any of it without E-rate, she did not hesitate. Something would have to give. “We would have to drop something on the construction side to make sure we have everything we need on the networking side.” A classroom not added. Science tables not ordered.
Not an unusual story
Brenna’s story is not unusual, and that is the point. All over the country, technology coordinators are keeping schools connected on tight budgets, often while learning the E-rate program on the job. E-rate is what makes that work possible. “I really don’t think we would have a network right now if it wasn’t for E-rate,” she said.
Facing your first E-rate cycle, or juggling a Category One and Category Two project like Brenna? You don’t have to navigate it alone. Request a consultation to work with a Funds For Learning Guide.
About the author: Sheauna has been part of the Funds For Learning team for nearly five years and is based in Edmond, Oklahoma. Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with family and friends, and she puts real value on building strong personal relationships and making space for the people who matter most.
