Delaware Valley Friends School was incorporated in 1986 as a coeducational, independent Friends School for adolescents with learning differences. The school opened in 1987 with 22 students.

The school is operated by a Board of Directors and is under the care of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. The program attracts students with learning differences from independent and public schools in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

Description of Network

# of Print Servers: 2000
# of Workstations: 188 Macintosh laptops, 55 Windows XP
# of Printers: 9

B/W - 9

2 - Canon ir 600
1 - Canon ir2200
6 - HP LaserJet 5

# of Users: 235

Description of Initial Problem

Initially we had no control over who printed to what printer, or how many prints. We were investigating Canon’s Netspot accountant and Equitrac. Netspot didn’t support Macintosh computers and Equitrac was so expensive we could never recoup the expense of the system with potential savings.

Description of Solution

Our evaluation is going as planned. The software installed flawlessly. We learned that our Macintosh workstations should be rebooted after selecting the printer queues for the prints to be accounted for properly.

We reconfigured our printer’s Ethernet switch so they could only communicate with the print server and can be reconnected with a single cable move. This forces all workstations to print through the print accounting server and gives us a quick solution in case the server has a hardware problem.

We are currently printing between 600,000 and 700,000 pages per school year. It is our belief that our volume of prints will be reduced. In the past faculty and staff members had been printing large jobs to our student HP printers because they were closer to their classrooms. We believe that our faculty and staff members are much more likely to print to our less expensive high volume machines now that their prints are being accounted for. This system could cut our printing costs by up to 1/3. This is significant as the volume of prints at DVFS has increased every year.