November 2006 — Features
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Special Section: Resource Management :: Value Judgments
Vendor Support
As more and more companies customize solutions for the unique circumstances of school districts—their budgets, their infrastructure, their hardware and software, their training needs, and most certainly their goals—districts are forced to come up with astute analyses of their needs. They are employing the total cost of ownership concept, if not using the CoSN-Gartner tool itself.
Take Watertown School District in northeast South Dakota, encompassing six elementary schools, one middle school, one high school, and one alternative school. Watertown wanted its 4,000 students to develop 21stcentury skills—the ability to maneuver digitally around files and e-mails—as well as have access to their school network from home. It also wanted improved communication in the buildings throughout the district, to be achieved by integrating a global e-mail system and a website that would be accessible to the entire educational community.
So Watertown called on the expertise of Gateway, which combined a wireless network with a PC for every student and teacher at the high school. The plan included:
- 1,385 notebooks with backpacks
- four-year warranties
- integrated online courses
- battery-pack chargers
- pre-configuration of the PCs to meet the school’s specific needs and requirements
Gateway also provided training for teachers—before students arrived in the fall. In August, students were given their notebooks. The results, says Assistant Principal Brad Brandsrud, can be seen in the school hallways each morning: “Every day, I can walk into the school and find students sitting with Gateway notebooks, reading daily announcements or checking for e-mail messages from their teachers before class.”
Gateway is only one of many major companies that are factoring total cost of ownership into their decision making. For example, Dell says the following on its website: “Every organization that uses technology, no matter what size, can benefit by viewing IT expenditures from a total cost of ownership perspective. This means looking beyond the costs of the end-user hardware, and considering other associated costs.”
The company goes on to list those associated costs—including technical support (hardware and software deployment, desk staffing) and administration (procurement, user training)—that must be considered.
John Cowie, Gateway’s senior director of education strategy, says that for companies such as Gateway and Dell, which market to school districts, there’s obviously a strong tendency to sell products to the superintendent. But, he says, “what we prefer to do—and what we coach our sales teams to do—is to spend time with that superintendent.”
Cowie understands the Herb Bergs of the education world. He wants his staff to ascertain what the superintendent is trying to accomplish before getting to the sales part of the relationship. Is the goal to demonstrate to the community that the district is on the leading edge of technology? Is it to decrease dropout rates by engaging students more in the curriculum? Is it to bring students in line with state-approved academic standards? The answers to those questions point the way for Gateway to provide the appropriate services. As Cowie says, “We’ve made a concerted effort to take a consultative approach.” The TCO tool makes this approach a far smoother one.
In comparing the technology rollouts of Watertown and Kershaw County, the two districts had different needs and met them with different solutions. What the TCO tool does is provide districts—some that have never scrutinized their technology resources or have done it haphazardly—an easy, effi- cient way of analyzing their resources and gaining support for those solutions.
Regardless of the visible advantages of using the TCO tool— identifying your own expenditures in different categories, comparing those expenditures to those of other districts, having the information to assess a variety of educational technology strategies— CoSN’s Kaestner says it’s the larger benefits that provide the bottom line: “You’re not installing technology to save money; you’re doing it to enhance students’ education.”
:: web extra :: For more on this topic, visit T.H.E. Journal. In the Browse by Topic menu, click on Accountability/Assessment.
Neal Starkman is a freelance writer based in Seattle.
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