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School May Turn Down $43K In Free Macs
Longfeather writes "Tukwila, Washington's cash-strapped Foster High School may have to turn down US$43,000 worth of free Macs because of a PC-only IT policy already in place. Read here(1) and here(2)." Surely some school would be willing to bend (or rethink) policy rather than turn away new computers.
I know Slashdot is a hotbed of anti-Microsoft bias, but would you be as outraged by these similar stories?
"School may turn down $43K in free Windows PCs; school has a Linux-only (or Mac-only) policy."
"King County WA school may turn down $43K in free Macs; many parents are Microsoft employees and want to support their employer's products."
Well guess what, Sherlock - its even easier to support NO computers! Sheesh.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
According to the article, there are already Macs in the school's library and graphics classrooms. Also, teachers can have Macs on their desk. This school is part of a re-organization to have three academies geared toward student interests. Expand their minds, while making them use one OS? Sure.
This gets back to a number of old (mostly bad and uninformed) arguments. Total cost of ownership, applicability of OS in the "real world", etc. I'm sure that all of the IT staff have MCSE certifications, and with that, the attitude that "Macs suck". Which was why the policy was created in the first place.
The reality is money is not getting spent on education. If it is to be believed(and I doubt it), the Gates Foundation grant doesn't specify what kind of computers are required. I applaud anyone, whether I agree with how they run their business or not, that donates large sums of money or computers to schools.
Schools shouldn't be stupid and turn away new computers, even because of some short-sighted IT proposal.
Despite this grant, PCs are STILL cheaper to buy and maintain generally
Cheaper to buy? No, not really. Apple's education programs are second-to-none.
Cheaper to maintain? Uh... how do you get cheaper than ZERO? Every machine Apple sells as part of their education program comes with AppleCare for the life of the machine.
Consider that hiring ONE Mac-savvy tech to add to their IT team would cost almost as much as the value of the grant in ONE year and would certainly exceed it in two.
How about spending the forty-five minutes necessary to make their existing staff Mac-savvy, then?
If they cannot spend the two days it takes to figure out 99% of how to run a Mac they should be fired. It's not like it's linux or something that is *more* difficult to admin than windows, it's significantly easier.
I am a software engineer and I use DOS, Windows (DOS based and NT based), Solaris (2.6, 7, 8, 9), Linux (2.2, 2.4 kernel based), OS 9 and OS X. There are more similarities between these systems than differences.
I guess the line should be "Schools turn down computers because IT support staff is either too lazy or too stupid to figure out how to use a computer that most 4 year olds can use."
Pathetic really.
but Schools are charged with preparing students for employment, essentially.
Really. While getting a job is a beneficial effect of going to school, I always kind of thought that the point of going to school was to get an education. Meaning, learning how to think, getting basic skills required to learn more in the future, getting exposure to knowledge outside of their immediate environment. If goal is just to get them into a job and get them on the consumer treadmill, why not just teach them to flip burgers, kick them out and be done with it?
And when these kids get employed, they will most likely be using PCs, regardless of OS.
Um, if it's a PC "regardless of OS", then the most important thing for them to put on this resume you refer to is "A Pentium IV 2GHz biege box with 512M of RAM and a 80G hard drive"?
the student putting MacOS on the "Proficiency" section of his resume is only adding a feather in his cap. A dirty, weather beaten feather. The part that will score the points is where he lists "Microsoft Office".
Doesn't "Microsoft Office" run on MacOS as well?
Using any of the current OS's gives kids general skills needed for dealing with computers. To think that they have to be trained on any particular system is really pretty short sighted. The way you accomplish various goals even changes between versions of Microsoft Office.
To turn down free equipment because of this kind of policy is just asinine. Maybe this is an opportunity for some of the kids (assuming these kids are old enough) to learn how to support different kinds of computers (and add that to their resume) since the school doesn't want to support them.
But, if they are rejected, at least the kids will be exposed to an important concept that will prepare them for employment: corporate policy.
As an admin at a college, one of my biggest problems is academic departments that put in for grants for stuff, get them, then tell us we have no choice but to support it.
Like, for example, some SGI Fuel station running a 3D projection system we were recently notified we have to support . Did anyone build in tech training into the grant for this? Of course not. Just plug it in, forget about it. What about security patches, what if it won't boot, etc, etc...
Or the famous trick of grants everywhere. Many grants require some sort of "in-kind" donation from the institution. So they calculate up IT staff time and cost, use that as the in-kind donation, then expect IT to absorb it into their existing duties.
Now in my shop, we are over a year behind in many projects and have to be restrictive with new ones launched due to budget cutbacks that have cut IT staff while numbers of equipment needing to support continues to climb. So it's possible that even a little extra effort (if it really is that) would not be possible without slashing support to someone else's project.
Now, I admit, if this is a political issue, it is assine. And, since no one really cares about IT load, I would bet that this is the case.
But please, try to temper the ole "lazy sys admin" criticism. It's most likely not warranted.