IP transit and direct peering serve the same fundamental purpose — getting your traffic to the internet — but the economics and operational profiles are very different. For K-12 school districts, getting this decision right means the difference between a tight technology budget and a sustainable one.
IP transit is the straightforward option: you pay a carrier to route your traffic across their network and on to the wider internet. You get simplicity, a single bill, and access to the carrier's peering relationships. The downside is that you're paying for that convenience, and your latency is subject to the carrier's routing decisions.
Direct peering — establishing a BGP session with another AS to exchange traffic without payment — sounds attractive in theory. In practice, it requires your own AS number, sufficient traffic volumes to make yourself an interesting peer, and the operational capacity to manage those relationships. For most K-12 districts, that threshold is beyond reach.
The practical answer for most districts is blended transit: two or more transit providers, chosen for geographic diversity and E-Rate eligibility, managed through a carrier-neutral broker who handles the BGP configuration. You get the redundancy and routing quality of a peering arrangement without the operational overhead of managing it yourself.