In the Wi-Fi world, the term "campus" usually means a cluster of corporate buildings, or maybe a university. In one recent deployment, though, mobility solutions provider Defywire took it to a new level, bringing Wi-Fi to an urban high school setting.

"If you have adults and students moving throughout the building, the question becomes: How do you access information in real time without being tied to a specific location? The need is common in all schools," said Daniel Gohl, principal of McKinley Technology High School, a Washington, D.C. magnet school.

Over the past several months Defywire has been deploying its Mobile Guardian system at the school. The system allows school administrators to access student disciplinary information, attendance records, class schedules, medical information and parent contact information over Wi-Fi-enabled PDAs.

Founded in January 2003, the 20-person Defywire is riding on $10.6 million in venture money at the moment. Given the paucity of such funding these days, that alone should give a hint as to the long-term viability of the program.

What does it do? In a nutshell, the high school deployment allows school officials to bust students more efficiently than ever before.

"We wanted to be able to show their administrative personnel that they could track students' mistakes very quickly, whether that meant discipline in the hallway or someone cutting class or a uniform violation," said Defywire chairman and CEO Jill Stelfox.

In a traditional setting, the best an administrator could do would be to write down the student's name, return to the office, pull the file, make a note, follow up—a time-consuming process and none too effective.

With the Wi-Fi connection integrated into the student-records database, the official can instantly pull up the student's previous disciplinary actions in order to take corrective action if needed. "Now they can deal with counseling the kid right there on the spot," Stelfox said.

Officials also can push information back to the database just as quickly. "Our concept was that by giving the administrators a PDA over Wi-Fi with a series of forms that could be filled out very quickly, they could record problems very easily," Stelfox said. That's an important function in light of recent federal mandates requiring schools to keep careful records of all disciplinary actions.

Defywire won't put a price tag on the system, but Stelfox said it cost "a couple of hundred thousand dollars."

The deployment itself was made relatively simple thanks to the very nature of the school, a magnet institution focused on the use of technology. "They have a very unique approach: Live with technology every day," Stelfox explained. "So the entire school is Wi-Fi enabled, every student has a laptop, they use VoIP for their phone system. In addition to a traditional library, they also have a very detailed requirement for Internet research for papers."

Still, the implementation of this system was far from simple. While security is always a concern, the idea of passing around student disciplinary action through wireless connections to handheld devices might have struck some as a daunting prospect.

Defywire took no chances.

"We have a server component that sits behind the firewall and integrates securely using SSL into the discipline system, which is one of the two sacred places, along with the medical system. Those are things that they don't want anyone hacking into at all, even more so than the grading system," Stelfox said.

Outside the firewall everything is encrypted, including user credentials. That way if a PDA is misplaced, even a tech-savvy student likely will be unable to make us of it.

Principal Gohl says the actual security is only half the puzzle. He also must manage the perception of security, assuring parents that confidential information will not go astray.

To that end he has made available case studies from the business community. He has laid out the relevant federal statutes and demonstrated the ways in which the school's Wi-Fi program complies with those. He also has given hands-on demonstrations showing the ways in which the new technology actually secures information more effectively than do the old paper files.

"Basically, you overwhelm them with technical data," he said.

If parents will accept these demonstrations, there could be a major market here. Defywire studied the 500 biggest K-12 public schools and determined that a potential $100 million market may exist for similar deployments.