November 2006 — Features
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Special Section: Resource Management :: Value Judgments
TCO Points the Way
Case in point: Kershaw County School District in Camden, SC, which numbers 10,200 students, 733 teachers, and 418 staff. Currently, all of Kershaw’s 20 schools are wireless, with 3,300 laptops in grades 9-12. But it wasn’t always so—far from it.
Supt. Herb Berg has raised ed tech
spending in Kershaw County SD from
$4 per student to $200 per student.
The online TCO tool helps direct the
money to where it’s needed.
Herb Berg is Kershaw County’s superintendent for public instruction. A superintendent for 30 years, he came to Kershaw County in 2002, bringing with him the knowledge that “really good districts have a technology component.” South Carolina state guidelines indicated that the average expenditure of educational technology was about $225 to $250 per student.
Kershaw County was spending about $4 per student.
Berg was confronted with two tasks: first, to get his district up to normalcy; and second, to determine just what kinds of technology the district was actually spending money on. To accomplish the first task, he and his business team managed to borrow $2 million for four years—a big step—which brought the spending ratio up to $200 per student. Then he sent out a request for proposals to vendors. As Berg says, “We wanted the billiondollar companies to tell us what we could do for that money.”
Hewlett-Packard won the competition, mainly because of its emphasis on training teachers. According to Berg, another company actually came in a lot cheaper on the hardware, but “they’d drop the box off at the door, and that was that.” Whatever was implemented, thought Berg, he wanted teachers involved from the outset.
Next, HP and Kershaw County went to work on determining just where the money ought to go. It turned out that a 1-to-1 program— one laptop to one student—was the choice. Fully 25 percent of the first year’s investment went to training; that secured buy-in from teachers. “Training helped the teachers immensely,” says Berg. “There was no resistance or pushback. Just the opposite. They were anxious for more.” John Stiver, the district’s executive director for secondary education, says, “Laptops are just a box if we don’t train the teachers how to use the software to integrate the technology into the curriculum.”
While the training was under way, the second task could be addressed: There needed to be some accounting of how the current technology budget was being used. That’s where the online TCO tool came in. The process was simple but not easy—just ask Phyllis David, Kershaw County’s director for operational technology. She worked with Kaestner on getting the information to be analyzed. She made a total inventory of the computers on each site, along with the costs of maintaining all the technology, such as it was. The initial survey required a signifi- cant chunk of time—four to six weeks—especially the digging for information from old files and from various grants and programs. But when David and Kaestner finally came up with the information, it proved invaluable. David was thrilled with the results. The TCO report acknowledged what she knew all along—in her words, “Folks, you’ve got aging computers.” The report also supported the need for more staff, and strongly supported standardization. Each site in the district had been using different hardware and software—a nightmare for district staff, who had to install, program, monitor, and repair the computers and otherwise support teachers. Now all technology purchases are reviewed quarterly by a districtwide committee and approved by David. Although the information was difficult to ferret out the first time, David thinks it’s great that the district is drawing up a technology budget each year. The information buttressed the HP initiative and cleared the way for future projects.
