I think this is exactly right for reasons that weren't important to the base story. The year after the story they moved to these Cisco VoIP phones that plugged

I think this is exactly right for reasons that weren't important to the base story. The year after the story they moved to these Cisco VoIP phones that plugged into Ethernet directly, which seems odd considering they had just recently moved onto what was supposedly a Telco provided IP phone service. I suspect someone either misunderstood what they were buying or someone misrepresented what they were selling. They moved to what they thought they were getting in the first place and dropped the telco entirely. For schools of that time, there was an incredible amount of money flowing around in the dot-com era. At least for a high school in a state capital. Both Microsoft and Cisco sponsored classes and teachers for them at my school. I got semesters A and B of my CCNA as a credit giving elective. My first time using Linux was (ironically) in the Microsoft sponsored class.