Fitzgerald has been calling public school administrators' attention to the total costs of classroom computing since 1998, when she spearheaded a project that looked at all the things that go into the deployment of technology in 120 technology-savvy school districts after the hardware and software comes out of the box.
The study, funded by the Washington, D.C.-based Consortium for School Networking, is part of an ongoing initiative to bring public education into the modern era of computer networking. Well, if not the modern era, at least into the 1980s, she says, where educational technology today most resembles the corporate business model in terms of the ratio of computers to individual students and the networking infrastructure tying it all together.
So what can schools learn from roughly two decades of private-sector computing? There are two things. First of all, business has figured out that it is much more cost-effective to manage computer networks centrally and, when possible, from the same technology platform. Second, administrators need to set limits on the number of software programs that teachers use to support their teaching strategies. Both practices tremendously improve the bottom line when the costs of maintenance and support are added to the basic price tag of a standard PC or a shrink-wrapped software application. The financing issues are similar to those surrounding school busing. "Beyond the price of the school bus itself," she says, "there are associated costs related to drivers, insurance, gasoline and repairs."
Jim Hirsch, executive director of technology for the Plano Independent School District in suburban Dallas, has taken that lesson to heart--and gone one step further. Hirsch oversees three technology divisions focused on curriculum development, technical assistance and network planning for the district, which is located smack dab in a major pocket of Texas high-tech country. His office houses a help desk that fields 40,000 calls a year for 25,000 networked PCs supporting 52,000 students. As part of this massive tech support initiative, Plano has negotiated a five-year on-site warranty with all its hardware, software and networking vendors. The vendors provide system maintenance and support and 24-hour turnaround for repairs and parts replacement, which have driven the system's failure rate down to a scant 1 percent.
In addition, Hirsch has taken technology funding out of the district's operational budget by using bond issues to pay for infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. Last year, voters gave Plano the green light to spend $15 million on new computer networking hardware that includes a wide area network and a brand-new fiber-optic backbone. This fall, voters are being asked to fund a $17 million replacement bond for aging computers on that network.
To be sure, residents of upscale Plano--many of whom work in the technology industry--are hardly typical of the parents of the majority of our nation's students. But the real tragedy is how poorly even our most technologically savvy schools perform when it comes to implementing common practices of good computer network administration. Among the findings of the Consortium for School Networking survey:
- The most frequently cited school district tech-support strategy was to rely on teachers, librarians and other non-technology staff, followed by limiting teachers' and students' ability to configure computers and standardizing the model of computers used.
- More than half of the responding districts said they relied on students to provide support as a way of controlling costs.
- Only 6.5 percent said they had standardized on a single operating system; 57 percent were supporting two or three operating systems; and among the largest school districts (those with 20,000 students or more), 39 percent said they had to support more than five operating systems.
