To facilitate a simpler means of grasping how the district has proposed spending the $50 million from the proposed tech bond, I condensed the proposal into logical categories and graphed them out. I hope readers find it informative. I’ll be sharing thoughts on these over the coming weeks leading up to the vote on February 25th.
One response to “Proposed Tech Bond Spending Breakdown”
Here are some observations, opinions and questions regarding the technology bond, broken into a couple of categories and approached from a do-we-need-it and who-should-pay-for-it standpoint.
As others have said, it is unfortunate that the school board has lumped all of this into a single bond issue because now in order to decline the “nice to have” items, the whole bond must be voted down.
SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE
————————————-
Many shared infrastructure items do make sense, though some of them raise questions:
> Is a private fiber network really warranted, vs. leasing that capability from a service provider such as Comcast, Wowway, etc.?
> Although some central/shared digital infrastructure might need UPS/generators for sustained operation or graceful shutdown, does each school need this? How frequent (historically) is loss of power? It seems that loss of power to a school would likely shut it down for many reasons (e.g. lights & HVAC) other than unavailability of digital infrastructure (except maybe telephony?), so what *actual* value would be realized by incurring the cost of UPS/generator power per school?
> Not sure about security infrastructure, but the proposal does raise questions:
– Cameras seem to have little preventive value and only provide after-the-fact “forensic” info — is that worth the cost?
– Would perimeter controls defeat a determined external threat? Would they at all impede internal threats? What is the practical value that warrants this cost?
PERSONAL DEVICES
—————————-
However, buying a personal device for students does not make sense (whatever that device ends up being, I will refer to it as a “tablet” below). I think most universities don’t do this, and I’d guess for the same reasons that the GPPSS should not do it.
Leaving aside for the moment whether or not the use of tablets by students is pedagogically the right thing to do, consider that the school system generally provides time-shared resources used in the educational process (e.g. buildings, faculty, education/arts/sports equipment, lab equipment, etc.), but it does not generally provide personal items for students (e.g. calculators, school supplies, backpacks, etc.). That is to say, the tax system is generally called upon to finance shared-use resources, and not individual-use resources. Tablets almost certainly would be individual-use resources, like calculators, mobile phones, backpacks, etc.
I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule that are addressed by the system (e.g. some personal items for those demonstrating financial hardship), and that same accommodation could apply to tablets.
I think there are a number of reasons why tablets should be bought by parents, and not the school system. Here are some that come to mind (I’m sure there are others that follow from the shared-vs.-personal principle mentioned above):
> In the spirit of parents providing the best for their students, parents are free to upgrade tablets as they see fit, rather than having to wait for the school system to do so.
> Many (and an increasing number of) students already have these personal devices, so GPPSS providing them would be wasteful duplication.
> People — and especially K-12 students — tend to be more careless, and less accountable, with community property than with their own personal property. These devices are much more fragile than books and much more costly than calculators.
> Unlike most other educational tools, tablets have use — and will be used — outside of school
> Whatever volume pricing GPPSS could get would presumably be available to parents.
> Parental ownership is consistent with parental responsibility for what students do with the devices, in or out of school.
> Parent-owned tablets reduce (eliminate?) the administrative burden on GPPSS
> Tablets offer relative stability/uniformity-of-environment and manageability that PCs do not (hence the rapid growth in tablet use), weakening the argument for the value of GPPSS ownership and administration. Conversely, GPPSS-owned-and-administered tablets would increase GPPSS administrative burden, with benefits of administration being somewhat illusory anyway (tablets can be readily compromised by “rooting”).
> Parental ownership will keep the school system more accountable for *realized* value of the tablet, vs. promised value. If the educational value of tablet to a student is as GPPSS argues, wouldn’t it “sell itself,” to the parents?
> This technology is characterized by both rapid obsolescence and fickle shifts in the dominance of technology platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.), all of which parents and students already adapt to with an agility unlikely to be exhibited by a school system.
> Rather than diluting the tablet-purchasing power of a parent’s dollar by dragging it through both the tax and school system bureaucracies, wouldn’t it be more efficient to simply require students to have a tablet and leave the purchasing to the parents?
I’m at a loss for what compelling reasons exist for the school system to buy the tablets.