“Some Foster High School teachers are balking at the idea that the school board could refuse to let them accept $43,000 worth of new computers the school was recently awarded through a grant program,” reports Nora Doyle for The King County Journal.
Doyle continues, “Earlier this year, teacher Jeff Heiman applied for a grant from a nonprofit organization offering 30 new Macintosh computers and six laser printers to a school in an economically challenged community. The Tukwila School District, with a high number of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch, fits the bill.”
“Heiman thought he had found an answer. When he found out in May that Foster won the grant, the math teacher was elated. The extra computers would give the students he’ll teach next year daily access to a computer, which they need, he said,” reports Doyle.
“But according to the school technology plan created in 2000, Tukwila schools will move toward using only personal computers, not the Macintosh, for financial reasons, Superintendent Michael Silver said. The district has a six-person technology department staffed with people expert in PCs, Silver added. Having only PCs allows the district to better maintain, repair and replace computers in a cost-effective way, he said,” Doyle reports.
“It’s silly to turn down the offer of free Macs when the school district has to provide technical support for the Macs already at the high school, said Heiman, who said he didn’t know about the Mac rule in the technology plan when he applied for the grant,” Doyle writes. “‘My job as a teacher is to do everything I can to improve the education of kids. In my professional judgment, we need these computers,’ he said. The superintendent said the district should stick to its plan. ‘At this point … going with one platform for a small school district seems most prudent,’ Silver said. The matter will be discussed at tonight’s school board meeting, when Heiman said he and other teachers will ask the board for a one-time exception to the technology-plan rule prohibiting new Macs.”
“‘In a time of serious budget crunches in the schools, for them to turn down a gift of $43,000 just seems asinine … Policy is a nice idea, but reality is that they’re going to have Macs and they might as well take the free ones when they can get them,’ he said. A school board decision on the new computers is not expected at tonight’s meeting,” Doyle reports.
“A caveat of the technology plan allows teachers to keep their Macs at their desks instead of getting a PC if they wish. In addition, the library and a graphics classroom can keep their Macs,” Doyle reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: While we realize that Tukwila is an economically-challenged School District and might have a hard time attracting the very best and brightest, but that does not grant license for their six-person technology department and Superintendent Michael Silver to be complete fools. Perhaps Superintendent Michael Silver would like to hear your reasoned thoughts regarding this matter? His email address is: silverm@tukwila.wednet.edu. We already sent him this link: http://macvspc.info/
I just want to know why these kinds of people feel justified in taking oppertunities away from poor children. I was poor as a child and I did not have the opertunities that others had. It was a long and difficult struggle to overcome both poverty and ignorance. We owe it to our children to make sure people like this will not stand in the way of tomorrows leaders. We must see that this community is protected from the clickish whims of a bunch of beaurocrats who don’t care about anything but their own fat asses. If you let them succeed in throwing away your childrens computers, what will they learn from this?
Perhaps it is better this way. Why give poor children a taste of the good life with Macs in school when surely the vast majority of them are bound for the trailer park and perhaps a Wintel piece of sheet if they’re lucky enough to land a job at Jiffy Lube?
If they had Macs, though, they’d have a better chance of escaping the cycle of poverty and ignorance, but then who would do the oil changes on Superintendent Silver’s Ford?
http://www.adbusters.org and yes, the world has gone mad.
won
To Superintendent Michael Silver:
You are not only a bloody idiot, but, are also a narrow-minded, short-sighted, greedy ferral lemming that can only follow dumed-down technology over the financial cliff………
At least that’s what he was sent; after all, he hates good technology so much, I doubt that he’d be here reading this.
As a former teacher, I can assure you that the school administration’s choices are based on past practice… always go the “safe” route… or what is misperceived as the “safe” route.
School principals get their jobs not on ability to teach and administer but to lubricate the backsides of higher-ups with their tongues. This school administration has chosen to follow the lemmings and no amount of factual info on why PCs are lousy choices will have any effect.
The only way to get these administrative incompetents to change their decision will be the immediate threat of losing their jobs via the ballot box over misfeasance in office..Even poor country types who think Bush is really on their side can figure out that turning down free computers is not good policy… and some of them actually do vote.
I wonder how big of a kick-back this guy is gettin’ from
M$!
Somebody needs to check his bank account..
I can’t believe someone is that shortsighted
or just plain stupid!
The dumbing down starts at the top!
I am an educator fighting the same thing in southern CA. The statistics our district uses in banning the purchases of macs are from 1997 and earlier. The only truly functional and PRODUCING labs we have in this district are mac labs (TV-Video Production, Digital Photography, Print Shop, Desktop Publishing, and Website Design). The PC labs are used for writing papers and internet surfing, period. Now, I have worked many years in the “real IT world” before becoming a teacher, and when IT people get involved within the educational part of this world; it becomes capitalism, not education of the children. Ironic, since this past year, the government passed a law about EVERY child being accounted for in education.
For those BOSSES who have let their status, expense accounts, and salaries expand, their education and common sense have shrunk.
I mean, geez… a GRANT… to grant children an incredible and creative opportunity (let the kids make the choice of computers when they get to the real world; by then, most of these computers will be all obsolete). A few years ago, our district passed on getting free SGI machines with licensed Maya on them from a donor; because we did not support SGI, the district refused to accept them.
Most computer parts are the same in consumer models; mostly made in Taiwan. What is the real issue here? Saving money for support, ROI, and TCO? I do not think so; it is about power and status. Like there, our district people make decisions, but never visit the classrooms to see what they are affecting. It is always about the numbers. This is why superintendents rotate around in their jobs all over the country.
The cuts in education are already severe; why don’t the people in power really take a look and see what is going on??? I am begging.
Here is our classroom website (where I teach TV-Video Production, IT, Advanced PC Repair (A+), and Networking Mgmt (Net+). We integrate macs and pcs seemlessly on all levels WITHOUT BOTHERING the district for support. And yes, I support ALL the schools in all platforms.
http://homepage.mac.com/rhsav
Urbz
Here is what I wrote to him:
Dear Sir,
I can easily assume that your Inbox has been deluged with mail in reaction to your decision to refuse $43,000 worth of free computer equipment, and, aside from some mail that is surely vitriolic, there are also emails presenting strong arguments for you to reconsider such a decision. So, I?ll not bother adding speccifics to the arguments that may be redundant (although, I consider myself fairly expert at debunking archiac myths and bias against the Mac platform). Let me just say one thing, and offer one resource that may not have been offered to you:
Everyone ? including Mac supporters — ?push their own iron?. Most everyone thinks the solutions offered from THEIR ?camp? are the best, sometimes argued at the expense of rational thought. But keep this in mind:
MSCE graduates are NOT immune to this condition. If you spent thousands of dollars teaching yourself ONE WAY to handle information technologies, how would you feel about a different solution coming from outside of your realm of experience?
Threatened.
I urge you to read up and educate YOURSELF on this issue. DON?T just take the spoon-fed party line from EITHER camp. I CHALLENGE you to play Devil?s Advocate, and I urge you to ask the question ?Why??, repeatedly. The HARDER you make those IT guys of yours WORK to press their point, and the MORE you MANDATE THEM to seek out legitimate information about the Mac platform, and the more you open your mind to SEEKING OUT the facts about the Mac platform (from sources INDEPENDENT of your internal IT guys), the better educated a decision YOU will be able to make.
Fight the herd mentality, because the truth is that the greatest challenge in talking about Macs is in wading through the myths and rhetoric to get to THE FACTS.
Besides the surely dozens of websites you have received from others bearing information, coincidence has brought to light a NEW WEBSITE established by Apple that deals with managing this platform IN AN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT:
An article on it:
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/10/eduit/
The site, itself:
http://www.apple.com/education/technicalresources/
And, I?ll toss in this website as a bonus, one that deals with integrating Macs and Windows systems:
http://www.macwindows.com
HERE IS THE ENDING of my letter (I exceeded this site’s limit on post length):
One last thing: if your IT guys have NOT used Mac OS X in practice, then they don?t know what they?re talking about when criticizing the platform. You can tell them with confidence that Mac OS X is NOT AT ALL like OS 9 and older were. Many beliefs about Mac OS from those days do not apply anymore. And, a bunch of dusty Performa 5200s and a gaggle of even older Macintosh LC475s (all of which have served your schools well, if you stop and think about it) ARE NOT REPRESENTATIVE of the $45,000 worth of BRAND NEW Apple technologies you will be recieving…
FOR FREE!!
May you do your job well.
Sincerely,
<my real name>
PS: If you have any questions or I can help in any way, just holler.
A Long story short — A Tale of Two High Schools — we have several hundred PC’s serving about 3500 High School Students in our county. ON any given day, about 40 – 50% of the PC’s are not operational. We have two Mac Labs in the same two High Schools — out of the 100 Macs in these labs, we might have one or two that are inoperative on any given day. The teachers are frustrated and angry at the lack of support for the PC’s, and their performance history. Simply stated, the Mac labs provide the ONLY consistent source of computer solutions for our High Schools. They run Mac, Linux, and Windows software (under emulation). What’s left to be said…accept the free Macs and see for yourself how productive your students and staff can be! (By the way…wake up and smell the coffee — IT guys have a vested interest in making the “PC” the standard — their employment and power base is insured!!)
My letter:
As an attorney for high-technology companies , I was shocked to hear that your school district was turning down an opportunity to obtain Apple Macintosh computers. More and more schools and companies are again are turning to Macintosh for everything from everyday business use to high-end science and math. Why? Because Apple’s computers now have a Unix-based operating system that is not only breathlessly easy to use, but requires little or no tech support. Our office has had Macs on 24/7 and we haven’t had a crash in the three years we’ve used them. Our local school has several thousand Macs (including individual laptops for all 7th graders) with nary a crash in the year they’ve been in service. Frankly, Macs put tech support people out of work. They’ll even admit it.
But the best part of having Macs in the schools is that they make everything from writing, to movie-making, to lab experiments, to mathematics, to composing music easy, inviting, and rewarding–exactly what children need. That cannot be said–not in the slightest–about Windows-based computers. I know. I use both. Windows PC aren’t even competitive when it comes to getting kids up and running on computers. Plus Macs are price competitive now.
Hope you get Macs into your school soon. You’ll never look back.
Cognitively challenged too!
Ironic that the school district home page uses an apple shape to house it’s menu on the left side of the page…
http://www.tukwila.wednet.edu/index.html
I’m utterly dumbfounded!!!
I’m still trying to make sense of this!
An admittedly poor school district turns down a 21st century computer grant! Who cares what platform! Take the grant, and the bragging rights of how well computer trained your underprivelaged students are now! It is so obvious to anyone with a brain that your IT people have you “suckered” – “hook, line, and sinker”!!!! Do you really believe you’ll accrue a higher IT cost by accepting the grant??? The school board should dismiss you and your entire staff!!! The hardware is almost identical, and they integrate seemlessly with (WIN) PC’s… and if it’s true that the equipment would be “new” then you’re covered for the first year under the terms of the Apple Warranty program!!! What’re you people smoking??
FUD rules the schools! When they can’t even teach our children the basics of math and language, when they cannot teach history without a revisionist agenda, why would you expect anything else. Turning down the Macs on this basis would be like turning down free electrification 75-100 years ago because all the maintenance people know are kerosene lamps…
FUD rules the schools! When they can’t even teach our children the basics of math and language, when they cannot teach history without a revisionist agenda, why would you expect anything else. Turning down the Macs on this basis would be like turning down free electrification 75-100 years ago because all the maintenance people know are kerosene lamps…
Thanks. I hope other people test it too. http://findaudio.freewebpage.org/