It wasn’t long for parents with pitchforks poked and prodded at the school board enough times that the members, sensing that in an election year, the “stick a fork in it it’s done” earnestness, might cause a competitive campaign or two. It still might, as the sting of imperious decree tends to rub people the wrong way. So last night they voted to restore the rights to bake sales, limited to special events and after school hours. But that’s not why, as they see in the education industry, they earned an F. The F is for Failure to submit a purchase request for computers where the numbers added up correctly. No, that’s not a figure of speech here, it is, according to the The Hour, a sad observation that our board of ed cannot demonstrate the very same math skills that Norwalk students are expected to learn. The details though sketchy resulted in one common council member abstaining from voting:
Richard A. McQuaid, council minority leader, afterward cited a typo made by the school officials — and later corrected — as grounds for abstaining.
“If you’re on the Board of Education and you can’t do math, I have a problem with that. Their (original request) was for 175 computers,” McQuaid said.
A $875,000 capital appropriation approved by the council for fiscal year 2006-07 is paying for the computers. The expenditure represents the second year of the Board of Education’s three-year technology upgrade plan.
It isn’t hard to submit pricing for computers, people who work in the corporate world do it all the time, and here’s the dirty little secret. Companies like Dell provide you with the full quote, after you simply declare you system requirements. You can do this online, in real time, and therefor there is no “dog ate my homework” excuse for submitting a proposal for one amount based on a different total number of computers with the corresponding invoicing for a different quantity. That alone earned them an F. But why stop there? There’s the whole issue of what technology they are choosing to being in to the classrooms.
With the Julie Amero case still hanging its preposterous legacy on computers in the classroom,
On Tuesday night, the Common Council approved the purchase of 200 Dell Latitude D520 laptop and 50 Dell OptiPlex 745 desktop computers from Dell Computers for the 10 schools for a sum not to exceed $233,808.“We probably have close to 4,000 machines (districtwide). We’re trying to replace 700 to 800 a year,” said Ralph Valenzisi, director of technology for Norwalk Public Schools. “We’re replacing them and installing software. The end of March is about the time (the 250 newest computers) should go in.” …For 2007-08, which starts July 1, the school board has requested another $875,000. The bulk of the money, if approved, will go to replace the district’s Novell Inc. network with a Microsoft Corp. network.
Microsoft makes bad software. There’s a whole industry devoted to “protecting” your computer from malicious spam, virus, malware, trojans, bots and other terms that make non computer aficionados eyes glaze over. But there is a computer platform that is more secure, and costs less to maintain. That would be Apple computers. I’m biased, I operate on three distinct computer platforms, Apple OS X, Windows XP, and Linux. As an advocate of open source software, I routinely scorn the sheepwalkers who buy Microsoft blindly, opening themselves to an endless war with insurgent attacks on computing safety. Schools, don’t have the largess of corporate budgets to endlessly dump money into technology designed only to keep things running as they were envisioned to do. Smart, A-List, thinking would steer school board technology teams into ubuntu for education, ubuntu, xandros, and of course the Redhat family of products. Which would mean that the operating costs of a pricey operating system that doesn’t work could be replaced with a low cost to free operating system. So the school board earns its F for not thinking, and not asking questions.
Kudo’s to Common Council Member Rick McQuaid, for remembering that we can’t expect our school students to meet high educational standards if the school administration is incapable of meeting basic standards itself.
Governor Rell has declared that more education funding is needed. She has loaded up a trebuchet with bags of cash she intends to launch at the education industry of Connecticut and somehow get better science and math education out of throwing money at it. Yet, here in Norwalk, the Board of Ed insisted on banning bake sales which would result in reducing money to the system, and then wasting money by improperly requesting technology funds which turn on purchasing notoriously flawed software.
So what should the Board of Ed have done? They should be spending time investigating technology budget requests and insisting that the best technology solution start with open source and free, rather than closed source and expensive. They should be spending less time worrying about what kids are eating at bake sales, and more time squeezing real education out of the dollars that they have instead of relying on parents and PTOs to fund raise in the first place. And maybe they should go back to their own education, and ask themselves why substandard work on their part should be presented to the public at all.
