November 2006 — Features
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Special Section: Resource Management :: Value Judgments
TOOLIN’AROUND
The following sample report generated by the Consortium for School Networking’s total cost of ownership tool provided one district’s leaders with the data to make the appropriate educational decisions. First, some definitions:
- TOTAL COST: a balanced look at how much it truly takes to support a computer
- DIRECT COST: all technology and direct labor costs—hardware, software, external application providers, direct labor
- INDIRECT LABOR COST: the costs of users supporting one another and themselves, attending training classes, learning informally, developing user applications, and experiencing downtime
- HARDWARE: computers, peripherals, servers, network equipment, printers
- SOFTWARE: infrastructure software, educational administrative software, personal productivity software, contentand curriculum-specific software
- DIRECT LABOR: includes burdened salaries from personnel whose jobs include operations and financial support, professional training and development, or curriculum development
- EXTERNAL APPLICATION PROVIDERS: organizations that provide the use of applications and associated services
In the case of this district, the report provided some important observations about expenditures compared to those of other case-study districts:
- Overall hardware costs were high.
- Direct labor costs were at the norm.
- Printer costs were low.
- Supply costs were high.
- Network costs were high.
With this analysis, district managers could clearly see where too much or too little of their money was going, and where it might be shifted to be brought more in line with the budgets of successful districts.
The results for Kershaw have been uniformly positive. The number of hours that its students use technology has dramatically increased. Attendance and engagement in school have shot up as well. Teachers say students are doing better in language arts. Stiver says the district has since restructured its middle school curriculum to prepare students for technology— they’ll be receiving less instruction on keyboarding and more on programs such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
At this point, every K-12 student in the district is slated to receive some kind of technology training. When the initial cohort of students with laptops graduates, those kids will be among the most technologically adept in the state. The business community, says Berg, is taking notice.
The TCO reporting ensured that the 1-to-1 program isn’t going to be a one-shot effort. With accurate, standardized, clear data coming in every year, the district can more efficiently plan for subsequent technology projects. Now it knows, for example, whether too much is being spent on hardware relative to what is being spent on software, or whether teacher training needs more attention, or whether enough money is going to supplies.
