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Funding for Technology Classes?
SelfTaught asks; "My school district recently built a brand new football stadium and athletics field-house, both with state of the art electronics; yet when asked about implementing a computer science class district officials reply with, 'This is a property poor school district.' Apparently property poor school districts have 20 foot plasma scoreboards and multi-million dollar athletic training facilities. As a pubescent high school student, I'm not very happy with the way my district spends the money my parents pay for my education. How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes? If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?"
I feel for you, this has been one of my pet peeves for years now.
But, look at the bright side, our (USA) sports celebrities are the highest paid in the world.
(Just overlook the fact that academically we are falling behind faster every year)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Unfortunately, sports brings in far more money for schools and universities than academics.
> How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes?
You can't. Even if you could, the changes would happen long after you've left.
> If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way
> to teach myself?"
Pick something you want to learn. Download it, RTFM, and play with it.
You'll have better luck if you have a concrete objective in mind, i.e. learn about databases by setting up a simple database to track your comic book collection, run queries against it, make a PHP front end to search it etc.
The only way I can think of is to petition the school. Just tell a bunch of people that the school has determined that they don't need classes that for people going into technologies. Spin it so that it looks like the school is forcing students to lose their chances into colleges and such. Spin the stadium to the effect that they spent all this money on it, but when someone wants to learn how to work with/on it, they won't spend a dime.
After you get the petition going, attend a district meeting and speak up about it. Just keep pissing and moaning. Eventually, people will listen.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I graduated from a small town high school in south texas, and the district was pretty damn broke when I left it, but our atheletic facilities were pretty decent.
Keep in mind most southern schools have "Booster Clubs" which are responsible most of the time for raising funds for the sports specifically. The only "booster club" for academics comes straight out of the general budget for the district. Meanwhile, you've got a bunch of meat heads washing cars, taking donations, etc, in a town full of people who are more than willing to fork over money for their friday night football game.
In most districts (i have lived in), sports and education are on different budgets.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes? If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?"
Well, you'll need to define what "technology classes" you want before you get the school board or most of us to listen to you. Do you want an "Intro to PowerPoint" class? Programming classes? Computer hardware classes? Actually, 'technology' could mean anything, not just computers. What are your goals? Be more specific.
My school district recently built a brand new football stadium and athletics field-house, both with state of the art electronics; yet when asked about implementing a computer science class district officials reply with, 'This is a property poor school district.' Apparently property poor school districts have 20 foot plasma scoreboards and multi-million dollar athletic training facilities. As a pubescent high school student, I'm not very happy with the way my district spends the money my parents pay for my education.
BTW, whining about money spent on athletics isn't the best way to get the school board to listen to you, although I'm sure you'll get lots of sympathetic responses here. High school football is a really big deal to most kids and parents so it will always be funded at a much higher level than classes. Forget about trying to take money away from athletics and put it into education. Your best bet is to make a compelling case for why your school needs a class on X and bring it to the school board. If they are convinced of its importance, they'll find a way to come up with the money. Trust me on this: complaining about something that is very popular will cause people to stop listening to you.
I'm not trying to be hard on you, but saying you want money allocated for something specific (scoreboard) to be divered to something nebulous (technology classes) just isn't going to work. You need to say exactly what classes are necessary and then provide compelling arguments why they are needed so badly.
Good luck, Kid. I'm not a fan of technology in the classroom at all, but I don't want my personal opinions to get in the way of advising you. If you want to fight for this, fine. Just be a bit more cautious about how you go about it.
GMD
watch this
It's easy to see that your team is winning by having the best technology and edging out another school with every advantage that you can get. Investing in the students themselves is always a complicated situation and the results tend to be poor.
What you should do is go to the public comment period of your next school board meeting and ask if matching funds were put into classroom improvement for each dollar spent on improvement of the sports program, and are they willing to stipulate some sort of matching dollars ratio for classroom improvement in the future. Don't expect 1:1, but if you even had 5:1 (sports:classroom) I suspect the improvement would be significant. There's also a sustainability aspect. If I write a check for $1m to my local school for a new stadium, they may already have the budget for maintence of it set aside. The operation expenses, training, etc.. for a new computer lab is not insignificant, think about the power consumption of all the lightbulbs in a classroom compared to 25 computers with 400w power supplies, a few laser printers, etc.. The electric bill may surprise you.
But honestly, this is an excercise in your civic duties (you can even get extra credit if you're taking a government class), attend the meetings, as booring as they may seem, you may be able to create some impact. You may be able to convince those that do attend the meetings and vote for your local school board that these things have value to them as well and see things change, perhaps not while you're still there but for others.
Same crap when I was in high school, exactly the same, back when we had pet saber toothed badgers and rode sliderules to school, both ways, uphill in the snow. This is the US, where professional sports rule, and the schools are the tax payer funded farm teams, even though they will never admit it.
Here's the sucky part-it isn't fixable. It's been tried. Bread and circuses (the gladiator games, etc) is an established technique that keeps the plebes occupied and ye overlordes in power (helps them anyway), so it isn't going away, the fix is in. It's just not, so no sense beating yourself up over it. Work around it. The best you can do is self education as much as possible, and work with any understanding teachers (there should be a few who "get it")and groups of friends (rocket club, computer club, whatever).
As to getting your hands on tech..you own a computer, or can you get a box full of odd parts? Swell. A car (any old junker is fine) with an engine and transmission and probably a comlicated electronic system? Swell. Some radios and other odd electronic stuff? Swell.
and etc.
Now, go tear that crap completely apart and put it back together again *better* than it was before. Not just the same, *better*. See what you can come up with, little tweaks and twists and mods and enhancements. You won't get any grades on it, but you for sure will get an education that is practical. You'll learn to think in steps and sequences, you'll get discipline and focus. That is what is important. It will carry over to about any other job you might get.
Is that these stadiums and facilities are off-limits to anyone but a few select school students.
It opened my eyes when I was in Europe, that when the school gynastic grounds were not in use (after school, weekends), the people of the community could use it. More often than not, they were not even "school grounds" officially, but community grounds that the school happened to be nearby and would thus use for their athletes.
I know there will be cries about pedophiles and such, but as a society, we tend to segregrate ourselves away into our niches anyway behind fences, gated communities, security guards, and what not, so much that it has gone into a completely unhealthy territory.
The other thing that ticks me off is the continual elite treatment/sexist treatment of Football. There is simply no woman's equivalent, even though Field Hockey did make a blip every so often. I was a soccer player. Despite the sport's continuing growth here in the US, we get second rate fields, minimal funding (and the vast majority of girls' sports are similiarly ignored in many schools) in favor of Football. The soccer team/field hockey teams can be state champions and the Football team can be complete losers and they will be still be treated better.
My first suggestion is to find some other students at your school interested in computer science. A school isn't going to add a computer science course unless there is a sizable amount of students who are interested. After you find other interested students, get a proposal for a new class going. Get a few signatures of students and parents (and maybe some interested teachers) and take it to the principal's office (or whomever else deals with course offerings). If it works, then great. If not, then try again next year.
In the meanwhile, I suggest that you read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs . This is the book that is used for the freshman computer science class at MIT. Find yourself a Scheme interpreter (and maybe even invest some time into learning Unix and maybe installing Linux or BSD if you're a Windows user. Unix, not Windows, is the main operating system used in computer science.). This book can get difficult, but you'll be very knowledgeable about the true meaning of computer science via that book. Then, after reading and finishing that book, then move on to learning C (for structured programming) and C++ or Java (for OO programming). Now that you have the theoretical background of programming understood, now you should learn some practical programming languages that you'll use for upper-division CS courses (operating systems, software engineering, systems programming, and the like) and in future industry jobs or research.
Finally, during your junior year of high school, start finding some good CS schools to apply to. MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, University of Texas at Austin, Harvey Mudd, and others that I've forgot now are very good undergraduate computer science schools. These schools are challenging enough to fully teach you computer science and prepare you for either a career in software engineering and development, or a research career.
I wish you a successful start in computer science.
In many areas, you have separate school district budgets and funding sources for General Administration (read: teacher salaries, supplies, etc.) vs. Capital Improvements (read: building repair/expansion). I know in Indiana over the last few years, some ridiculous football scoreboards and basketball arenas were built, because the schools had a glut in the Capital budget but were constrained in the General Administration area.
Changing those funding sources and spending controls is a long-term affair, and not easily done.
The other factor here is private donation - to be sure, there are a lot of people out there who will easily drop down $$$ for a new football facility, but bitch & moan if a tax hike is proposed to bring in more/better staff. On the other hand, you have donors like the local car dealership, who drops down a few thousand in exchange for some advertising space or something similar. Perhaps something like that could be leveraged on the General Administrative side of the budget - say, a Microsoft-sponsored computer science class? Nobody here would object to that, right?
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I'm a few years ahead of you (class of 2001) and I share your pain. While my school did have a few computers and a programming class, it was horribly outdated. The problem with the school systems is (obviously?) the administrators. Even as they throw out all the buzzwords for the parents about how "technology friendly" they are, they will always spend more on asthetics because they relate how they run their schools with their own high school experience. When I say asthetics, that's something that they can show parents and other school administrators to show what a great school they have. That can be a football stadium, new cafeteria, whatever. If you just look at how much money goes into a football team, for instance: stadium, equipment, extra pay for coaches, transportation for away games, maintenance, insurance... it really is staggering. And what educational value does football provide? Absolutely nothing aside from a little "school spirit".
Anyway, off my soap box about schools... what can you do about it? I seriously doubt you're going to change the culture of your school or how they spend money. More power to you for trying, and I'd be highly impressed if you did it... I just don't think it's going to happen. Sorry. What you do have is this incredible collection of knowledge known as the Internet. Pick a programming language. Almost any modern language you pick has an open source equivalent (at some level) that you can play around with at home. Even Microsoft has student/free editions of a lot of their tools. I wanted to build web applications (remember, I started high school in 1997) so I started with what I thought was the easiest and most popular web development language: PHP. Now, almost ten years later I know or have at least played with: C/C++, Python, PHP, Ruby (RoR), C# and what makes me money: Java.
You're the master of your own destiny and being in school you typically have a lot of free time to devote to playing with new languages and getting your feet wet. My advice is to find people that are like you, I gurantee there are at least a handful at your school, and team up with them. Pick an application that you want to build and a language you want to build it in and just dive in. Who knows, you could be the next Google.
I did exactly what I described above when I was in high school. Unfortunately all the cool software development I was doing distracted from school, so I ended up barely graduating with a 1.9GPA. It's hard to focus on worksheets and study guide busy work (all copied from the Addison Wesley material anyway) when you're going home and building all these really cool things. But using everything I had learned working at my own pace with my friends I'm now 23, own my own home and make around $70k a year. Screw school, do it your own way.
"How can I encourage my district to provide more technology classes?"
Well I have all this money I saved from downloading movies, music, games, software, and books. I'll be happy to donate to a good cause.
You probably can't change the school district as a whole, but you might be able to start a group/club or something. If you start such a group, you'll get a whole lot more support if you can find a mentor - perhaps a teacher who has an interest in what you want to learn. That mentor would have a bit more pull and better ideas of how to get funding and resources to help your club if it is not a huge liability or burden to the school.
Back when I was in high school (a LONG time ago), the only reason we had a programming class was a teacher volunteered to teach a group of us. We couldn't afford a Fortran compiler for the PDP-11, so he bought a textbook and taught us on the board. We hand wrote our code and he did a vis-grep on it to see if we were going in the right direction. Our school didn't have a calculus program until a teach volunteered to teach a group of us. This was after he agreed to teach a single student in parallel with another class (the guy sat in the back and essentially studied by himself, with the teacher "guiding" his studies.
Be willing to heft some of the load yourself, find like-minded students that can be trusted to commit and seek a faculty sponsor. And, be clear about what you want to do - "having a computer club" is a bit vague compared to having a "mysql" seminar series...
Did you ever consider going to school board meetings and bringing this up or passing petitions around? Get enought students/parents interested and maybe the school board will hear the people..and if not, well aren't the school board advisors voted in?
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
...if you can. Assuming it's not a private high school, that is.
Organize your statements, as previous posters have said--define what is "technology", have concrete proposals ready.
Prepare possible cost breakdowns.
Compare science programs of other schools, communities, school districts.
Appeal to patriotism (cheap, but hey, it's America.) Sputnik caused a boom in American science education, and ChinaIndiaRussia are in the process of blowing America out of the water.
Use sound economic logic (i.e. it's a gift that keeps on giving through alumni donations, it profiles our schools as academic powerhouses and makes it more desirable to academics, it results in statistically higher admissions to good engineering schools, whatever--do research.)
Try to engage corporate sponsorship--write letters to companies like HP, Sun, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, etc., they have entire departments devoted to creating PR through this sort of thing. Also, corporate matching funds tend to motivate people to spend public money.
Try to contact your school board reps directly, organized like-minded friends in a letter-writing campaign. Get your and their parents involved as well.
Get PR--write letters to the editor of your local paper, try to get someone to cover the story with a slant. "Schools neglecting science and technology education in favor of jocks" sells papers.
As for yourself? The truth is out there. You have a PC, an Internet connection and some equally interested friends? Start a club, start reading and hacking, and you're off.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
My high school had an annual budget $17 million, and they don't offer tech classes either. I asked why, and the explanation was as follows: It was a college prep school, and colleges prefer that students DO NOT take compsci classes because often times the information can be out dated. I took matters into my own hands. You get alot more out of learning by doing, and you often learn faster, and with greater depth and more knowledge of what is important. How do you learn Linux? Install it on your main computer and use it. How do you learn XYZ programming language? Come up with a project and do it (this leads to more projects, which leads to more understanding, which leads to more projects, etc.) Any question of the above sort? Do it.
OTOH, the only real expense of adding a CS class is a teacher. A new computer lab isn't necessary; you can learn all the basic principles of programming on the kind of old computers that people give away. But the school isn't gonna teach a class for one person, so you need to get together a class's worth of kids interested in taking CS, and then seeing if your school will offer the course (especially possible if there's already someone qualified to teach it).
If not, try taking classes at a local college (or community college). Some high schools will let you do so during school hours, but you might be forced to go at night if your school is particuarly pig-headed.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I went to Highland Park High School in Dallas. Very similar situation. I would later end up one of the coders on Doom & Quake, so you can imagine my frustration at the time. HPHS is a public school but with generally very wealthy kids, a football stadium that was truly a spectacle of steel reinforced concrete and civil engineering, a famously disciplined football program, and a super-lame lab with virtually useless PC's and one programming class taught in Pascal or Basic, if I recall. As a result, I basically held my breath until Dad bought me an Apple //e, which really served as my primary education and social experience until I outgrew Applesoft and 6502 asm somewhere in my junior or senior year and started going to my Dad's office so I could learn C on his PC.
Here's the trick. Wish I had known it then. The football budget came from donors, and that's basically the answer to your question. The stadium and the atheletic raquetball and other stuff thingy building, were named after the big donor who plunked down millions. That's the ticket.
What I suggest you do is learn something about business development, which is the kung fu required to land great facilities of any kind, because unlike the programming language, API's, and OS du jour that will be a useful tool to you for a healthy 5-10ish years, savvy business development never goes out of style, and will actually help you land a fully funded, sweetly decked out lab, along with great courses.
The proper approach will depend very much upon the specifics of your situation, who you know (both students and adults), and your various superpowers. If you want me to help you figure out The Path, drop me a line, and I'll see if I can be useful.
Until then, several of the really good colleges have open courseware that you should start working with in your spare time:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare
Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon
As far as money goes, when John Dillinger was asked why he robbed banks, he said "because that's where the money is."
The reason football teams have booster clubs is because they work. The same thing will work for high tech, and they have more money. Try to get some local company with smart people to get involved. They will have financial resources and expertise that you don't. I answered an ad in the local newspaper to help the students at my local high school organize a computer club. Organize the club, get local businesses to contribute, get local developers/database guys to come and lecture. Pretty soon, you'll have a club with enough going on to ask for a real class.
The club also answers your question: "If I can't get technology education in school, then what would be the best way to teach myself?" Working on learning something with a group is a great way to learn things. Get the club going, and then say "this month we're going to learn foobar!"
You're on your way.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I am also a high-school student faced with such a predicament. My school just added a huge fitness center, a new sports field, and a new softball field. All amidst huge district budget cutbacks that have forced us to turn down the heat during the winter, and consider cutting classes such as Applied Physics and Auto Shop. But there is a golden light among all of this, This year our school became one of the first in Illinois to offer courses from the Project Lead the Way Foundation . Forty-eight of my fellow students and I are now enrolled in the entry-level course called Introduction to Engineering. We can earn up to three collage hours, and the program offers up to six courses over three years and covers many different areas of engineering. Unfortunately for you they don't really offer computer science classes, but it is a technology and academics related class that may get the district's attention.
P.S. Some previous posts mentioned how a computer science class may suffer from small interest. At my school, the Project Lead the Way class had over one hundred fifty applicants. So many in fact that the teacher has decided to increase the number of people accepted next year from forty-nine to seventy by adding extra classes.
If your high school won't offer technology classes, see if you can get credit for taking them at a local college. A community college would be fine, for introductory classes. Encourage like-minded peers to do the same. If enough kids do this, your school district will be inclined to offer such classes. A kid a few years older than me did this at my high school, and singlehandedly created the computer science program at my school. I was lucky enough to be a few years younger, so I could reap the benefits of this.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
Do what I did: Take AP CS on your own. Then be sure to apply to Olin College. It's lots of fun, admission comes with a full-tuition scholarship for everyone, and we take innovative, world-class technology classes every day. Oh, and since there are only about 300 students, we don't really have X-inch plasma screens at our football stadium. Neither do we have a football stadium.
/.ers. I remember feeling exactly as you did about sports vs. academics in HS, and worrying about the same thing coming into college. As so many previous posters have pointed out, although there's not much you or I can do in the short term about that sort of imbalance, it's not truly as harmful to the academic side of most schools as it may seem. Schools generally budget the athletic department separately, and those departments (especially in colleges) often pay for themselves with ticket sales and athletics-specific fundraising. Do what you can toward learning technology / computer science in HS (i.e. independent study, college courses, joint enrollment, etc.), but don't feel bad if you don't get away with much technology coursework under your belt; at the very least you'll be in good company when you get to college and start learning what you really want to learn. It may not be the best way to run a national educational institution, but (as always) the really bright folks don't depend on the educational experience as much as the sort of middle bracket on which America is losing so much ground to the rest of the world.
Shameless pitches aside, I'm afraid many American high schools like yours and mine simply won't offer worthwhile technology courses until it's too late - not just for you and me, but for lots of young
Good luck, and keep Olin in mind when college app time rolls around =).
Want to make decent money in a high school? Be the football coach. And traditionally they'll only make you teach some "worthless" class like history or civics. My world history teacher was the wrestling coach. He'd frequently need a mid-class break to take a couple puffs on a cigar and the school let him get away with it.
One of our suburban high schools build an olympic regulation pool. Now they bitch there isn't any money for basics.
What are you going to do when American education has local control and it's treated like a game?
I'm pretty sure sports only actually *make* money at the college level. And maybe some high schools in Texas. :)
I'm sure 99% or so of the comments on this thread will be about how sports get all the money and the tech classrooms don't get squat blah blah blah.
I propose everyone who is complaining about how crappy things were in their school also post how much money or time (or both!) they've since given to their school to improve conditions.
*cue cricket noises*
In a more positive vein, an earlier poster said to get up, get out there, bang the drum for donations, document everything, and so forth. That's the best comment in the history of slashdot. The only thing I could add to it would be to push it through a business class and use that class time to write up a business plan to create a non-profit to funnel donations to technology-based schools using that very plan of action.
Simplest answer.
the Political Inquirer
Well, the long and short answer...
Short: as others have said, teach yourself. There are tons of free online resources where you can learn, experiment, and interact with others. Some great starting points are the Wikipedia Subject sections, and MITs open learning websites.
Long answer: Sue.
Semantically, this may be shorter, but it will probably take longer than you are in high school. I am always hearing about lawsuits involving education and property use.
IANAL!
Some things from these cases - 'Mt.Laurel decisions', 'Abbott Districts' - instruct that it is up to the State to make sure that every student is given an adequate eduation.
If you can find some way that another school district offers something you don't get; sue them to get what is equitable. (Then setlle for what you really want.)
If you can't use the fields/ swimming pool / other resources - complain openly to your government >US Senators, state legislators, county, city.. etc. about how your family's tax dollars are being abused. Again, you can probably sue. I'm farily sure these "park/facility is only for local resident use" laws can only be applied if no money comes from tax dollars. With school resources, 'reasonable' use should not be denied. You may have to sue them to force the authority to acknowledge that fact. Now, if there are regularly scheduled practices & games - and groundskeepers aren't working 24/7.. then they are reasonable to restrict field use during the season.
That doesn't mean they won't be embarassed if a TV-News reporter shows a mega-huge$$$ jumbo-tron right outside a school with falling ceiling tiles.
Sue. If nothing else, being involved in a lawsuit will show you how things really get done in this democracy of ours. It should be a somewhat painful eye-opener - and it could last you 10 years or more. That could be a real lesson.
You are focusing on the wrong problem. It isn't football versus academics. As other have pointed out they are in different budgets. In the south if you don't have football you might not even have a school. I live in a property rich school district (Round Rock ISD in central Texas). They just spent 26 million dollars out of a 16 million dollar budget to build a new football temple. OTOH, they do have some technology courses and even an Information Technology Academy magnet school. They also happen to have thousands (tens of thousands) of high tech people living in the district.
But here is the problem. Where do you get teachers qualified to teach this subject? The starting salary for a teacher with a degree in computer science is the same as the starting salary for a teacher with a degree in underwater basket weaving, about 35,000 per year. The bonus for having a graduate degree is only a few hundred dollars per year. No work other than teaching in a public school is counted as experience so not matter what you have done you start at the bottom. You have to pay for a fair amount of schooling on top of your degree(s) to get a teaching certificate. You even have to pay to work for them for your first semester, its called student teaching.
I know all this because I have been going through it. I have a masteres in CS and 30+ year exerience in "technology". I'm 99% done with the course work needed to get a teaching certificate and have passed the (joke of a) test to be certified to teach computer science in Texas. Now that I am at the point where I can apply for teaching jobs I am finding out that schools do not want people who are experts in any subject. There aren't enough students who want these classes to justify having a full time CS teacher. A highly qualified CS or math teachers must also be highly qualified in several other areas and be willing to teach English, or shop, or be a sports coach, if they hope to get a teaching job.
The result is that people who are qualified to teach these subjects do not want to be teachers and even people who are qualified and want to teach have trouble getting jobs.
That leads to a real Catch-22. Few students want the classes, few teachers are available, therefore no classes are taught. If there were hundreds of parents (students don't really count) demanding these classes then the school would try to find a way to teach them. But, even if they want to teach them, it doesn't mean they can.
Stonewolf
P.S.
I currently teach at the college level. It is much easier to teach college than to teach in a public school.But, the problems are still there. There are very few students who what to learn hard subject like CS or IT right now.
Just who are you to question The People's desire for football stadiums?
You know, that word (pubescent) is usually used as a derogatory term by older people (who presumably have completed that troubled time that is puberty), to look down upon those pesky, inconsistent youngsters who don't know what they want but keep bitching about it.
Seriously.. wtf?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I'm all for combining nerdy technical skills with gladiator games. Seriously, if the original poster is going to start tearing up equipment and putting it back together, or building stuff from spare parts, why not build a battle-bot? If he or she can get together with a bunch of like-minded students, maybe they could start a club and build several battle-bots. Then all they have to do is convince the school principal to let the club have robot battles out on the football field during half-time. It would draw attention to what students can do with technical knowledge and the right equipment. And it would be really cool if the school band would play that fight music from Star Trek during the robot battles! 50 Quatloos on the Droid of Death!
Here in Canada, though it's more hidden, it's just as bad. I attend trustee meetings routinely and was horrified during one meeting to hear them turn down a motion that would have provided wireless high speed Internet access to three small schools in the area, the extension of a current project. The motion was declined in favour of providing funding towards playground improvements at a local school - improvements that, it was admitted during the meeting, were not truly needed, but were just an attempt to "have a better playground" than another school. Be glad that at least the money in your case was going towards a venture that can, though it's unlikely, lead those kids to a career of some kind.
nice idea really and would be quite the local spectacle. Expensive as in a lot of smashed equipment, but save it for homecoming or something and it would showcase nerd power.
First thing to do is find out how many people share your same views. Talk to your computer teacher and see if they can help in getting together a group of students, parents and maybe even some former alumni who majored in computers at the college level. You need to know if you are the only one who cares about the issue or if there is a large cross section out there. One person isn't going to get far. A large group will get taken seriously.
Second thing, get together a list of exactly what you are asking for, with prices. If you just vaguely ask for a computer lab upgrade, those in power might assume that you are talking 10's of thousands of dollars. Spell out in detail what you want and what it will costs. Also, be willing to volunteer time to set everything up and provide tech support. That will help cut costs.
Now, take your group and your list to the principal. Don't mention the football program or any other program. The minute you play the "They get everything and we get nothing" card, you will be immediately pegged as a bunch of whiners and you are putting the principal's decisions under attack. Now he is thinking more about justifying his sports expenditures, than about giving you what you want. Just present the fact that a large group thinks that it is time for an upgrade, and you have all the details and resources to make it happen.
Assuming the Principal doesn't listen or take action, then head for the Superintendent and if he doesn't listen, then to the School Board. If all three turn you down, then there is really no much else you can do within the system. From there on out, you will have to go out side the system to hopefully apply some pressure. Contact local newspapers first, then contact some of the national news channels. Maybe someone will pick up on the story. The story may be more about you organizing a movement, than the actual computer issue. But whatever gets attention.
I would have thought that by now this problem wouldn't still be as bad as it was 20 years ago. I think if your looking for alternate resources to learn then you have chosen the right approach. Get out there and ask! The internet is full of information. I read one post that said you should try to narrow down what your looking for and I agree. Technology is a term that covers a universe of opportunity. Whether you looking to learn coding, hardware, electronics circuitry, or whatever YOU find interesting. You can also join groups of people just like yourself on the net that take on small projects in the spirit of learning. I could sit here all day and dig up links for you but I'll just offer up these. http://www.w3schools.com/ http://planetsourcecode.com/ Do you already know what direction you want to go in?