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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 foresee that, as a result of this brilliant strategy, many of the parents might move their kids to other schools, and this story will add to the long list of people who signed a deal with the Devil and ended up pretty badly.
(Hint: as the article says, 2 years ago the school won a $427.000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Sure, this is totally unrelated and I believe it)
The fun part is that it says the refusal is due to the school's policy of only having Windows PCs in order to keep maintenance costs and staff down. Too bad they already have many Macs around.
I hope Apple makes this story very, very public
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
Isn't this kind of government waste why god invented Fox News at 10?
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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."
I work in the seattle school district, they are very PC centric, but they would NEVER do such a thing. I feel sorry for the teacher, it is his class and his kids that will be most affected on this. It is utterly rediculous for bean counters who don't understand technology to make this decision. Their tech support is scared, they don't understand the macs and don't want to. I personally manage a mixed platform school and I by far prefer maintaining the macs, my life is easier because of them. The fact is, there are studies showing that macs have a lower total cost of ownership. Plus, they are just better computers for education, hands down. They would be foolish to turn down this offer. The school board, for its pompous attitude should pony up the money personally to substitute other computers if they continue to pursue such a stupid policy. They are wrong, only the kids will suffer from their bias and incompetence.
Well guess what, Sherlock - its even easier to support NO computers! Sheesh.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
THe article mentions this rediculous policy for PC only systems because of their IT staff and quite frankly it's foolish. IT departments, personel etc. are constantly updating their knowledge to better deal with emerging technologies, right? Why an IT department can't have 3 of those in-DUH-viduals learn about MAC systems?
I've worked in almost half a dozen IT departments and we constantly were exposed to systems that were good for various reasons, and we had to learn. Failure to do so resulted in eventual 'replacement'. That included MAC systems. And it didn't cost the department any extra, for us to learn and actually use with some degree of success these systems. Sure we brought stuff home to learn with (including a handy g4 tower, but that's another story) but isn't that a part of the job??
The ignorant attitude of the administrative personel (probably influenced by the IT depts. unwillingness to learn mac's for some biased reason) shows their competence in the field.
just my 0.02Â - mod on!
I'll take 'em! What's wrong with that school? They're free! for cryin' out loud.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
Wow! That's like, what, four whole new Macintosh computers!
(Proud owner of an iBook. Just sayin'.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
This actually makes a little bit of sense. Training is not free. If their IT guys don't know anything about Macs, they're going to need some training to get up to speed. That could easily run into the $10,000+ range. Perhaps that still makes sense in total dollars, but finding the money for it could be difficult -- the $43,000 worth of computers doesn't add any money to their available budget.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
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.
I advise my son's elementary school concerning all things that are computer related. School districts are interesting entities - There are so many dynamics running around (and different turf wars) it isn't even funny.
1) Many teachers are computer illiterate. They don't like being shown up by their students who are mostly not computer jocks because they've grown up with them!
2) Software used on campus has to be approved for use by students. This is required because teachers need to be trained on the software, hardware & OS compatibility needs to be assured, and the appropriateness of the application need to be accessed. All this usually costs money.
3) The support staff has to know how to support the hardware and software that you already have. Someone earlier said - IT guys/gals are ALWAYS upgrading their knowledge. You probably don't work for a school district!
4) School districts typically under-estimate the cost of an IT infrastructure by orders of magnitude. They have extremely in-adequate support for staff, software, and hardware support issues. Our district has roughly 50 schools at the K-12 level. Assuming about 100 computers per site you are talking 5000 machines. The district has 5 staff people to support all of this. Further, they don't budget for the up-keep of anything.
These staff are responsible for the district internet infrastructure, the network infrastructure at each school (much of which was put in place by volunteers with no documentation), repair and up-keep of all computers both at each school site and the district office. Just 5 people do all this. Yeah -right.
Let's say you get a donation of 20 Macs - that's great. These machines are going can be expected to have a 10 year life time. There are still Apple II'c in use on my son's campus!
5) Planning a district infrastructure is a nitemare because school budgets are a moving target, you receive donations from all over the board. It's a true patch-work. It's amazing anything works!
So - I'm not suprised they turn something like this down!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Unfreakin' believable. I'll admit, I've got a slight Mac bias. I've worked on PCs, I've worked on Macs. I know what's easier to fix. I know that studies have shown you need something like one technician for every 50 Macs whereas you need one technician for every 25 PCs. Downtime costs money too...
But the main point...it's just dumb to say "you can only use one computer system". What if they said "you can only use Ticonderoga pencils" even if you got a whole shipment of Bic mechanicals for free? Or who knows how many other goofy scenarios could happen.
Our schools are having a hard enough time as it is. To turn down free materials is just plain idiotic.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
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.
If they were offered $40k worth of free textbooks,
would they request that they were all the same book?
It would certainly be easier to track and catalog
multiple copies of that one book than to have dozens of
new additions to the book tracking system. If one of those
multiple books were lost or destroyed, it's replacement
overhead would be negligible.
Think of the overhead of having to provide different
teachers for the variety of subjects that multiple books
would require! Multiple teachers teaching multiple subjects,
how inefficient and inflexible. If every class in every grade
covered the same subject, thousands would be saved in salaries
and scheduling costs.
The cost-efficient school, it's the wave of the future.
Yes, this is an absurd argument, so is denying young minds
the opportunity for exposure to more than one way to approach
a problem. What makes this whole thing really stupid is that
there's not that much difference between a Mac, a Windows
box, or a Linux system. If the IT staff can't handle learning
something new as part of their job (and this is not that hard),
then they should hire people that are more capable. With the current
job market being what it is, it shouldn't be that difficult to
find people that can handle supporting Macs and Windows and Linux
and still be cost effective. If the school superintendent can't
figure that out, then it's time to replace them as well.
Maybe they can get some extra funding by eliminating student
drug testing and locker searches.
Or, heaven forbid, reducing the budget for sports activities.
How many of these kids will be working with computers,
directly or indirectly, vs. playing for the NFL or NBA?
When I went to highschool long ago (2 years ago) we had a computer science teacher/system admin that firmly believed in being bilingual as far as computers were concerned. He himself being a Mac guy obviously knew what their advantages were, how easy they were to use and maintain. But he also knew that not every place in the world supported macs (including our own school board that forced him to resign after they had enough of him proving their purchases of large ammounts of windows boxes to be erronious and far more costly) However, while I was there, I did learn to be bilingual (and picked up his personal prefrence for macs) Now that I am out of school, I work for a web page company that runs totally windows boxes. This was fine, except that I had a far superior titanium laptop at home that was being largely unused while at work. So (with the boss's permission, I got a few help articles together, and brought the TI into work. within 5 mins my computer was connected to the server just like all the other computers, with one major difference. My computer has yet to be nearly as problematic as the rest... kinda funny considering its a windows server...
There more [operating systems|programming langugages] one knows the more the similar they seem to be.
Any so-called IT professional who only knows one solution and refuses to learn another is a moron and a dangerous liability, because the whole nature of IT is keeping up with change and knowing more than one solution to a problem.
What a horrible example these people are setting for their students!
I don't see how anyone could turn down free Macintosh hardware. It is generally of higher quality than typical PC systems sold to pre-college institutions and requires less maintenance, plus apple has one of the best support services in the industry.
On top of that MacOS X can be used for all the usual user applications, and you get a full-fledged unix development environment built in for classes that can take advantage of it.
Show me someone who willingly turns down systems like this and I'll show you someone who doesn't deserve their job.
It's Washington state.
Actually, it's not just Washington State. It's probably more Foster High School. An ex-girlfriend of mine went there back in the early 90's (she did the community college thing her junior and senior years because the academic programs at FHS were so poor).
Anyway, I showed her the story last night, and she said "Figures. I thought they were morons then, and it seems they haven't changed."
Except this wasn't Apple giving it away, it was a grant that could be used to buy Macs. Probably a private Mac-promoting organization. Yes, I agree. Usually when MS gives software away, it's 'dumping'.
If MS were to give away the whole thing, it wouldn't be so big a deal. If they were to do it willingly, it wouldn't be a big deal. But when they try to give away software as 'payment' of fines, that's not okay. MS giving away '1 billion dollars worth' of software isn't the same as paying 1 billion dollars.
If MS was to get together with a hardware company, and give away a bunch of computers, loaded with MS software (especially if the software doesn't have more limited licensing than normal,) that would be okay.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Here's what they totally should have done:
1. Accept donated computers.
2. Trade them / sell them / get rid of them for profit.
3. Use the profit to buy PCs.
4. Come up with some story about how the Macs were a disaster for their IT department, completely unusable, etc., and sell it to Microsoft for some extra cash.
Somebody oughta give me an MBA.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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.
and how is this different than the Ballmer going to Europe to pursuade people to use windows?
RTFA, dummy. This grant is coming from a nonprofit organization, not directly from Apple. Ballmer's "persuasion," on the other hand, comes directly from a Microsoft slush fund.
The $43K grant was presumably open to all qualified schools, with a single winner. The Microsoft slush fund only comes into play when a subsidy is needed to block non-MS products from being purchased somewhere, with a single winner: Microsoft.
~Philly
Pay taxes in Washington? King County? Tukwila even? Even bought a Washington lottery ticket? Feel like this is a waste of your money? Write a letter (Tukwila School District 4640 S 144th St. Tukwila, WA 98168), or email or call the Superintendent (Michael Silver, silverm@tukwila.wednet.edu, 206.901.8009). Sadly, the actual board members or chairman have no contact info listed, and email to lastnamefirstinitial@tukwila.wednet.edu bounces for the Chairman. As a person with a few years of tech support experience for Washington school districts (luckily, not Tukwila), I find it not unsurprising that this would happen, but it disgusts me nontheless.
Just follow the day, and reach fo
According to their website, they have 2,600 students. I'm the technology coordinator for a school district with 2,200 students and ~700 computers (97% Mac).... Guess how many IT people we have?
One.... I handle everything from setting the machines up to networking to adding users. Every student gets a file server account that follows them from 1st to 12th grade. All students in 6-12 get an e-mail account. Every computer is networked.
This district will be getting a call from me tomorrow, and a letter to the editor to the King County Journal.
What, me worry?
.... I handled a reasonably big network of mixed Macs, Solaris and Windows stuff supporting TCP/IP, IPX and Appletalk protocols.
I had no training whatsoever but a big willingness to learn and try things.
They nicknamed me "The Guru" after a few months in the work and kept calling me back after I left for ad-hoc small work.
Anybody that is working under unfavourable conditions but with reasonable management should be able to learn this stuff by themselves if needed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.