August 2008 — Special Feature
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Make It Stretch
As technology funding dwindles, districts must use the resources they do have to maximum advantage.
IF YOU'RE A K-12 EDUCATOR traveling down
the information superhighway, you're likely to hit some speed
bumps. And the biggest of those will be a lack of money.
While legislators proclaim the need for 21st-century skills in
education, federal funding for technology-- the underwriter of
those skills-- is shrinking. According to the 2008 "National
Trends" report from the State Educational Technology Directors
Association (SETDA), funding through the
No Child Left Behind Act plunged 45 percent-- from $461
million to $253 million-- between fiscal years 2005 and 2006.
Since many states rely on NCLB for most of their ed tech financing, they've had to cut back on funds for school districts. States also vary widely in how they allocate available resources and in the mandates they place on schools for how they can spend technology dollars. So, although some states have innovative technology projects-- Illinois, for instance, has a School Technology Revolving Loan Program that allows schools to borrow money from the state at low interest rates to support technology infrastructure-- not every district can rely on these initiatives to fill a specific technology need.
But there's nothing stopping schools from stretching the resources they do have, while scaling down IT requirements. Tracy Smith, director of technology for Idaho's Fremont County Joint School District 215, has established an innovative program to make the most of what the district receives in state and federal funding.
With about 2,100 students in nine elementary, middle, and high schools spread over 160 square miles in rural Idaho, Fremont County faces serious technology challenges. "Our district gets roughly $70,000 a year, and most of that we use to pay for networking, bandwidth, and so on," Smith says. His budget only allows for a few additional computers every year. Students are one or two steps behind the latest computing technology, and for elementary school classrooms, there aren't funds to replace every computer. So Smith turned to NComputing, a vendor of low-cost virtualization software and hardware, to purchase a device that enables a single PC to be shared by multiple students at once. The result gives every student in a classroom computer access at a dramatically lower cost than the price of purchasing a new machine for each one.
"We had five computers in every elementary classroom, but we could replace only one of those five," he says. "So we ended up with one that was new, but four were Windows 98 machines. We didn't have the money to replace them all. We had 240 computing environments to replace and it would have cost us nearly $150,000. So I thought I'd try NComputing's X300 access device. I could attach three computers to that one new computer in each classroom-- and I could do it for $70 per environment, a fraction of the cost."
