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EDITORIAL: Laptops and support go hand in hand
May 11, 2011 (The Times-News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
In 2013, $3 million in laptops will flood Idaho schools. In 2014, $11 million will be used for their purchase. The year after that, another $14 million in laptops will be given to students.
Within four years, there will be tens of thousands of new computers in the hands of Idaho teens.
And the state has yet to finalize how to support them. As Buhl School District Superintendent Byron Stutzman told the Times-News: "It takes money to run technology."
Ideas have been discussed, and Idaho schools chief Tom Luna's office says that the task force will have a plan ready sometime within the 30-month window before laptops start appearing in schools. However, a support system for these truckloads of technology should have been drawn up long before the money was budgeted.
The state's goal is to handle the machines more like a service -- repair fees would be bundled with the price of technology. If a student's computer gets a virus or the batteries won't charge, it's shipped off to a support center somewhere instead of fixed locally. Luna has repeatedly said that the cost won't trickle down to the local school level.
It's a goal that makes sense on paper, but the reality may be different. Twin Falls School district currently has six employees to support its 3,300 computers. The number of machines will more than double by 2015, and in an era of razor-thin budgets, we don't expect more money to be allocated for tech support staff.
Even if those computers are shipped off and repaired out of state, somebody has to do the diagnosis. The schools' technology people will end up replacing batteries, checking to make sure software updates are running and that the system is indeed malfunctioning before they box it up and ship it off.
And that takes time.
Even if Twin Falls School District's six tech staffers can handle the increased workload, smaller districts are getting a raw deal. Murtaugh's school district has one part-time technology person (who's also a maintenance man). Dropping dozens of laptop-related problems into his lap doesn't seem like a particularly well thought out plan.
In many ways, it's like maxing out your finances to buy a Porsche, and figuring that, by the time the payments come due, you'll have figured out how to pay for those hefty insurance payments.
When coupled with the plans to teach educators how to use the new tools, the addition of technology is going to be a distinguishing factor in Idaho's education plans. We just wish that all of the costs had been figured out from the beginning.
To see more of The Times-News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.magicvalley.com Copyright (c) 2011, The Times-News, Twin Falls, Idaho
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