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In my area, it's that the technology budget is separate from the general fund budget. The general fund, which pays for teachers, facilities maintenance, and thi
by wiredfool 13y ago
In my area, it's that the technology budget is separate from the general fund budget. The general fund, which pays for teachers, facilities maintenance, and things like libraries is squeezed by falling payments from the state and a cap on the amount of local contribution. We're losing teachers each year (I think 7 years and counting) and the overall budget is down about 35% from the peak in the early 2000s. The local voters haven't rejected a general levy in many years, although they did reject a capital levy for a renovation to combine two schools. (that would have closed a school campus that dates from the early 1900s and needs seismic upgrades to be safe, and moved the students to the half empty high school)
The tech budget is funded by separate tech levies, which can only be spent on computers or tech related staff.
This leaves the district in the strange place of being able to afford iPads all around for a couple grades in middle school, but not being able to afford a librarian for the primary school. There can be a media specialist, but only if the media is not books. They can have smart whiteboards in each classroom. But not a librarian.
- chatmasta 13y agoLet's start a charity where developers donate time to migrate local schools to open source.
- atgm 13y agoIt's not just the migration, but the support. I wouldn't want to be reliant on charity or the type of support many open-source projects have if I were a school.
- reedlaw 13y agoWhen I've helped rid people of their virus-infested Windows problem by installing Ubuntu, I rarely heard back from them. It really is easier to use and less error-prone in many respects.
- wildgift 13y agoIf you were a school district, you could probably afford to hire a person, part time, to make sure the software worked.
- wiredfool 13y agoI'm a developer. I do IT stuff for servers. I can't even get the somewhat technical in their own field non-developers in my office to try linux. No way in hell do I want to support the desktop users of my school district. (for reference, I've taught an intro cs/programming class there as a volunteer (using open source software, yay!), and have some idea of what their systems are and what kind of environment they're up against.)