Granted, every School District is going to have its own way of dealing with IT, but here's how things were during my stint volunteering at a LA Unified School D

Granted, every School District is going to have its own way of dealing with IT, but here's how things were during my stint volunteering at a LA Unified School District elementary school between 2002-2004. First of all there was some up front payment the school/district made to their contracted IT provider. Wehn purchasing computers, no matter what type of computer you wanted, it would cost at least $1400/unit. This was because it came as a package deal with "support". Typically this meant the choice of an e/iMac or iBook or some cheap Dell box with a cheap 15" CRT. As a result the much better equipped, teacher preferred, Macs were typically what were purchased for classrooms and the bargain basement Dells made it into admin offices. Additionally a server for At Ease for Workgroups[1] was occasionally purchased for some other ridiculous number I don't remember. At this particular school, even if you could switch the entire campus to FOSS software, it wouldn't really affect costs because the school signed a contract to lock the price in at a certain rate. The contracting company would have just pocketed the savings. Now, the worst part was the the price premium for "support" bought you the privlidge of having the the buck passed to Apple for Mac support (basically some sort of Applecare for Education) or shipping in a new Dell that would sit in a supply closet until they sent someone out... if they ever did. Hence why I was volunteering. The school was pretty lucky as computer purchases tended to be an uncommon event as this school was near Universal Studios and Warner Brothers and both would regularly donate a number of their two year old "outdated" machines. A lot of what I ended up doing was replacing aging LC IIs[2] and Performa 575s[3] with the new computers. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series