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Technology Spending 2007-2008
(Originally released to the web February 25, 2007) [Editor's update, March 15, 2007: Since this article was originally published the Readington administration and school board reduced the number of laptops and Smart Boards being proposed but then approved spending on the SchoolWires web hosting vendor. The 50 teacher laptops and 32 Smart Boards will now be more like a pilot program and the laptops will be purchased, not leased. Previously 230 laptops and 130 Smart Boards were proposed. The spending on the SchoolWires web hosting program was approved without any official from the district or the school board contacting the alternative vendor suggested below. ]
The “seamless” use of technology is mentioned in the Readington strategic plan under one of the goal statements approved in January 2007. No doubt the marketers of corporate software and networking services who exploited that basically meaningless term in the early nineties would be amused to see it as goal statement today. In the technology budget report now available on the school website and in the spending requests we are already seeing at board meetings, the implications of this seamless integration are becoming clearer. In the last two years technology spending in the district soared. This was caused, we were told at the time, by one-time purchases of computers and related items needed to replace the aging and ineffective hardware being used by staff and students for as long as four or five years. In August 2005, for example, board member Tom Davis almost physically choked when he saw the request to purchase some $230K worth of personal computers from Dell corporation. Still, these requests were approved and many thought that the bubble of tech spending would subside for a little while. According to the district’s own 2007-2008 budget report, proposed technology spending over the previous school year is up 30% to $785K. In the private sector, IT directors are used to pinching pennies and seeking the cheapest effective route to support organizational goals. This diligence filters down to areas as seemingly inconsequential as printing and copying. Departments share multi-function printer-copier-fax-scanner machines and individual printers are a thing of the past. Page counts are examined in order to maximize hardware and consumable use. In areas like networking, bandwidth needs are examined closely and department heads are often required to justify their use of local and wide area network pipes. With limited bandwidth available, sometimes the marketing department is throttled down to make room for R&D. Software purchase and use is strictly controlled according to organizational priorities and hardware purchases are limited to agreements with specific vendors. During disaster recovery planning, the fundamental technology needs of the organization are defined, and that pecking order is often used to guide general spending too. Contracts with technology vendors are regularly challenged for price and content, and competitors are called in for consultations as a matter of course. One would wish to believe that our school district has mirrored some of these practices over the past few years, but wishing it doesn’t make it so. With the appointment of a new technology director perhaps we can bring the district more in line with the private sector. In the meantime, there is a proposal for $785K in spending before us and there are indications that this is the tip of the iceberg. The first of this spending is already on the February 27, 2007 board meeting agenda as motion A-3. An outsider recently pointed out to the district that the contract for website hosting and support to SchoolWires—the vendor responsible for the district website—is quite high compared to other vendors offering similar contracts. That vendor asks for over $20K to support the website over the next year. Educational Networks, a different vendor, would charge only $7.2K for the same year, and that would include a custom design instead of the generic template offered by SchoolWires, it would include a photographer on site and training on site, it would include transfer of existing content to the new website and more. The total project time is estimated by that vendor to be two to three weeks. Some examples of that’s vendor’s work are here:
The SchoolWires based website, regardless of cost, is seen by many as a poor example of design. The navigation on the site is redundant, dated and overly layered. The template structure is inflexible, ponderous, and generic. The graphics are amateurish even by late nineties standards. The content is rife with errors and omissions. Plus, the company didn't even monitor or configure the site well enough to prevent it from going down for three days because of a simple DNS error. In the private sector efforts would be made to reexamine the use of this SchoolWires vendor and, if a contract is pending, to request a month to month contract to allow for more time to justify the cost or to switch over to a better vendor. Instead, the district, bowing to time pressures, is moving ahead with the full request. Indeed, teachers have recently been trained to use the SchoolWires template system to create their own web pages on the site, a move which unfortunately only underscores the amateurish look of the site and cements the relationship with this vendor even more. The other requests in that motion are for wide area network services from Embarq (formerly Sprint, and before that United Telephone in this area for those who used slates and chalk in school). These requests also seem high, but buyers of network services in Sprint territory know that there is little that can be done. The patchwork of federal and state laws that determine territories for vendors like Embarq and Verizon create pockets of geography where competition is non-existent. If Readington were in Verizon territory, we would have more options. Further complicating matters is the E-rate funding, which is the black hole where all those little fees we see on our phone bills go. Schools and libraries can get funding for certain technology spending and that funding distorts the marketplace in strange ways. The E-rate program is also rife with fraud and questionable practices, but that is an issue beyond Readington. Price aside, do we need to upgrade the wide area network? Is there a less expensive method that could be used? The reason given for the upgrade to ATM from a simple and lower bandwidth frame relay approach is that the district would like to provide streaming video feeds to classrooms from various educational sources. However, even with the peculiar distortions of E-rate and of being in Embarq territory, there are other options to investigate. IP VPN solutions have come of age and legacy frame relay networks are frequently replaced with such a system. Piggybacking on the public network is cost effective, although it does require a different configuration of routers, firewall and other hardware and software systems. Plus, have we studied the effects of multiple simultaneous video feeds on the proposed ATM network as far as latency and bottlenecks for other district services? Do we know yet how these video feeds would be used and how often they would be attempted? One month after the strategic plan stressed seamless technology we are biting off a big chew. Returning to the proposed spending in the budget report, we find that our new administration intends to broadly expand technology investments based on ideas that have not been vetted publicly by the school board. These investments include substantial money for wiring and network gear, for teacher and student laptops, for ceiling projectors, and for Smart Boards—a kind of high tech display board. According to the budget report, five year leases will be used to purchase much of this new equipment. The annual cost of these items is shown to be nearly $400K, or almost two million dollars over the lease term. This is not another one time anomaly, but a decision to commit to an expansive technology budget over five years, on top of whatever would be needed for “normal” support of district technology. The requests for wiring and network gear are reasonable and overdue. The district’s local area network is unquestionably a spaghetti mess and much of it was installed by volunteers who knew not what they did! New cat-6 wiring and wireless access points are worth the investment. The laptops for teachers and students raise some questions. The teacher laptops are intended to be used both in school and at home, which introduces the need for a level of help-desk support that this district has never before seen. Will this move make more work and require more personnel down the line? Have these costs, along with the costs of the equipment, been considered relative to the benefits of teachers carrying their own laptops around? Is there any reason teachers can’t continue to use their own home computers to access district email in the same way that corporate workers do? Laptops are also relatively fragile and prone to breakage sooner than desktops, and these costs are not yet factored into the lease-purchase. Student laptops raise questions too. These units are needed, it is apparent, for the new NWEA testing scheme being proposed by the administration. While it is certain that students can use these laptops for other tasks too, would it be otherwise necessary to have laptops available for the lower elementary grades? In all grades has there been specific planning about how this new hardware would be used in actual lessons, or have we put the cart before the horse? Similarly, the ceiling projectors and Smart Boards are expensive technologies to put in place if there has been no planning for specific use. We are told that staff members are excited about the use of Smart Boards and that it could be a moral booster. Yet, as this technology is being put in place in other places, people are wondering if the investment is worth it. A study in the UK about these same Smart Boards, reported by the BBC, found that they can “slow the pace of whole class learning" and lead to "relatively mundane activities being over-valued." The ceiling projectors are meant to replace the televisions currently in classrooms which are too small to be seen by children. Video would be projected onto the Smart Boards. The entire investment in televisions the district made was apparently wasted, so, have we learned a lesson there? Observers wonder if it would be wiser to slow the pace of spending and to do more piloting in the district. Are the Smart Boards as useful in a first grade classroom as they are in an eighth grade class? Is it better for a six year old child to manipulate a virtual letter on a Smart Board or is there an advantage to the tactile response she can get from holding a physical manipulative in her hand? Are there specific lesson plans being proposed for Smart Boards, video projectors, laptops and bigger network pipes, or do we intend to look at that after these purchases are made? Are we in a position to justify an extra $400K a year on these items, or could we spend that $400K (if it even exists) on something more worthwhile? In the private sector spending on technology is preceded by organizational justification for every line item. Maybe that has already been done by the Readington school district internally, but precious little has been shared in public. With Readington homeowners and taxpayers already into five figure territory each year, there is certain to be a lot of questions about this proposed spending and the worthiness of some of it. The school board will consider the first of it on February 27, 2007.
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