In 2017, disaster struck at Lone Star College-Kingwood (LSC-Kingwood) when Hurricane Harvey swept through and flooded almost the entire first floor in six of the nine-buildings on campus. Since then, Lone Star College’s Associate Vice Chancellor of Campus Services, Butch Juelg, Director of Campus Services, Regan Houang, and the rest of the team have worked to not only restore the building, but to also upgrade most of the technology throughout the Kingwood campus. By leveraging the Hitachi OneVision program for higher education, Juelg and his team have spent the last 18 months upgrading every affected classroom and conference room from traditional Hitachi lamp-based projectors to the LP-EU5002 laser projectors.
At LSC-Kingwood, as well as all of the Lone Star College campuses, Juelg and his team are in charge of all classroom technology including computers, collaborative instructional spaces, AV classroom technologies and projectors. After Hurricane Harvey, the Campus Services team evaluated all of Lone Star College’s technology, and created a plan to upgrade every classroom across all campuses with new Hitachi laser projectors instead of the traditional lamp-based.
“We’ve known about and been interested in laser projectors for a while, but haven’t been able to justify the cost,” says Juelg. “It wasn’t until Hitachi added laser projectors to its Collegiate Series that we were able to defeat the cost of the bulb and make the switch to laser projectors. With the extended life and low-maintenance operation, Lone Star College will be able to reduce cost by no longer having to purchase bulbs and save time by not having to replace them. We’ve replaced most of the projectors on the Kingwood campus, and will begin to switch over other campuses starting in Spring 2019.”
Juelg and his team have been able to use the OneVision program benefits to manage their budget by taking advantage of specialized pricing and the Buy-10, Get-One-Free projector reward program that members receive. OneVision members also receive direct access to Hitachi sales and service experts, advanced replacement on products and an extended 5-year warranty on projectors and 1-year warranty on lamps.
Now, nearly a year and a half after Hurricane Harvey hit the LSC-Kingwood campus, Juelg and his team are happy to announce that the campus is up and fully-functional. With the upgrades completed, Juelg and his team are now concentrating their efforts on upgrading another 100 classrooms this spring before the new school year begins in the Fall.
“Now that Kingwood is up and running, we’ve put together a plan to upgrade the projectors across the rest of the campuses based on their refresh schedule,” says Juelg. “With six main campuses, and hundreds of classrooms on each campus, it will take us six to eight years to fully turn over all of the projectors, but we’re excited about our updated standards to include only laser projectors moving forward.”
