Hays Consolidated Independent School District in Texas started introducing new digital technology for the entire school district, including digital signage displays. The district has been an avid user of projection technology, especially for presenting information in classrooms.
“We’ve begun deploying digital signage systems throughout the school,” says Dianne Borreson, Chief Technology Officer for Hays CISD. “For example, cafeterias have digital displays for menus.”
At Hays CISD Johnson High School, the district went big into video, with 86-inch LG stretch monitors in the front of the school to highlight the school’s mission and provide visual communication to students, staff, and visitors. Trox, the district’s technology solution provider, helped shape and evolve the school’s original concept. The district wanted a large LED Signage solution, inspired by scrolling, ticker-style displays. They decided to settle on traditional LCD screens in a super wide format.
“We designed it with eight total screens, installed end-to-end,” says Paul Venincasa, the Trox executive who worked with Hays CISD on the project. “First you have five screens, then the videowall turns a corner and there are three more. And it’s designed to be a single canvass when the school wants it to be, with content spanning all eight screens. Or it can be segmented, with one or more screens devoted to a specific message or video feed.”
Trox installed the video wall at Johnson High School include a Crestron System and 4K video processing so the school could have flexibility in how it uses the wall. Users can select a video source and a display to place specific content on the video wall. Surrounding school districts have caught wind of the Johnson High School video wall and began inquiring.
“A single monitor is essentially four TVs in a stretch frame, so think of the wall as having 32 inputs,” Venincasa says. “We wanted to provide a connection to each input so that the end-user could put any source material to any input on each display and matrix it any way they preferred.”
