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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."
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!
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.
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 did a study at my university because the Science department had to eliminate a lab. We had two Windows PC labs and a Mac lab. Part of this study was to find TCO for each lab. In short we found that the Macs were significantly cheaper in the long run. This was for a couple of reasons (there were more but these were the most significant:
1. Longer lifespan for both hardware and software for Macs
2. Administration costs were lower (hours of tech needed for each lab
3. Licensing was cheaper
We found that once we purchased the Macs the actual cost to maintain the Mac lab was almost nothing. A single tech could take care of the unix servers and the mac lab while each of the other labs needed two techs a piece.
They got rid of a PC lab.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
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?
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??
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 they will cost more in maintenance and training
I disagree. Any IT person worth his salt can learn to support Macs on a network in about a day, probably just by himself, too. OS X makes networking really easy. There really is no need to map special folders on servers anymore. And besides, Macs are the king of cross-platform integration. Files, sharing, etc. are already taken care of.
As for hardware support, the guts are pretty much the same as PCs. In fact, things like driver issues are not even a consideration. Therefore, switching out drives and PCI cards, etc. is super easy! Actually, the end user or lab advisor probably doesn't need even need an IT person for hardware support. They can do it themselves.
It really boils down to Macs being alien to most people. They are afraid that if they use a Mac or if somebody gives them a Mac, their lives will be severely disrupted. But it won't. And again, the Macs are free, they don't have to keep them, they can trade with another school district, or sell them on eBay or something. If anything, they will save or even make money off of those Macs.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
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...
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.
I was going to reply but you hit the nail on the head. There are a couple of things I would like to add.
High school students are going to be a LOT tougher on equipment than students at university, so in terms of hardware longevity a comparison between the two is invalid on its face.
Even if they are tougher the comparison is still valid. If two people beat equipment the same way the poorer equipment is still going to fail first. That is the reason we saw 2 year turnover for our PCs and 6 year turnover on the Macs. We still have a Mac from 1984 running as a server to collect weather data from accross the state. It hasn't been rebooted since the last tech took over. That was two years ago. Another reason is that Apple works hard to make sure their software is backward compatible. We could run Macs for 6 years because the software would work seamlessly with the newest Macs.
There is talk of another round of budget crunching and we may have to merge the two labs. There isn't enough space for all the computers and the decision has already been made to get rid of the extra PCs and keep all the Macs. First because they are so much cheaper in the long run and second because of such high demand from both the students and the teachers. Not only that but our Xserve and Linux servers play nicely with the Macs and we don't have to worry about a service pack breaking everything with an undocumented change.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
A few years ago I was attending school to become a systems analyst. During that time we were all required to lease an IBM ThinkPad and soley use PCs throughout the time in class. We learnt how to program in VB and we were all taught the ins and outs of Office. When the opportunities for co-op came around everyone was competing against each other for jobs. Basically we all had the same skills.
I had only one interview and it basically went like this:
President (of the company): "Have you ever used a Mac?"
Me: "Yes I have, for about 15 years."
President: "Can you start on Monday?"
Me: "Yes I can."
Thanks to the fact that I am extremely proficient on both PCs (Windows or Linux) and Macs I got one of the best co-ops available. It is now my full time employment (I have since graduated) and I would have to be crazy to look for another job.
Just so you know, thanks to a particular "dirty, weather beaten feather" attitude many people have today towards different computing platforms I am the only one of my peers that can travel and the drop of a hat (just got back from Alaska), afford basically anything I want and spend the majority of the time having fun at work instead of trying to sell cellphones at the local mall.
Don't ever think that knowledge, in any respect, is a waste and never advise someone that only their skills on only the most popluar mediums will get them through life.
Variety == Spice
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
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.