[thelist] targeting K-12 effectively

[David McCreath]

Keith wrote:

> So that's my question, "Where the hell
> DO we come up with this nonsense?". Does anyone have any real, current,
> nationwide statistics?


Hi, Keith --

The problem is that it varies dramatically from district to district and
  even from school to school within those districts. But I can give you
some specific numbers for my district. We're one of the 50 largest
districts in the US, in one of the most wired states in the country. We
have 90+ schools in the Anchorage School District, with just under
50,000 students, about 3,000 teachers and another 3-5,000
support/adminstrative personnel.

Our platform mix is dramatically Mac heavy, and dramatically old. All
told, we have roughly 10,000 computers throughout the district
(including student lab machines, teacher desktop machines, servers, and
support personnel machines).

Of those, the support/admin staff have the most up-to-date, which means
anything less than three years old. They're probably split fairly evenly
between Dell and Apple. That accounts for about 1,000 of our machines.

We have about 3,000 educational iMacs that were leased from Apple for
three years. That lease is up next year. Those are the most current
machines in the schools, aside from a few admin machines and network
servers. There is currently a discussion centered around buying the
leased machines for $1 each or negotiating a new lease.

The bulk of the remainder is made up of Macs older than iMacs. We have
literally thousands of machines that can barely use Netscape 4.08, going
all the way back to LCIIs and IIcis. (Actually, I personally know a
teacher who just retired his Apple IIe because he was able to "upgrade"
to an LC5620, and he's thrilled. I also know a teacher who maintains an
AppleTalk network of SE/30s in his own classroom because the school lab
doesn't have enough machines for all of his students.)

All of these machines are supported by two people on a help desk, three
field techs (software), and three hardware techs. There is another
department called "Instructional Technology" that is staffed by 10
certified teaching personnel whose stated purpose is to help teachers
integrate technology into the curriculum, but more often then not, they
end up troubleshooting file servers and helping set up networks because
our three field techs can't get to everyone who needs help.

Another huge problem is our network. We're saturated every single day.
Right now things are pretty fast because it's spring break, but most of
the time I might as well be on a cable modem. And most of the schools
are wired with 10 megabit hubs in the labs, not 10/100 switches.

But you want to why your K12 stuff should take older browsers into
account? ADA compliance. I have yet to talk to a K12 staff members whose
district doesn't benefit from the E-Rate program, which subsidizes
connectivity. Our district benefits to the tune of around US$1 million
every year. Last year, Congress attached an Internet filtering
requirement to E-Rate funding (have a filter in place by a certain date,
or you'll be responsible for coughing up all E-Rate subsidies ever paid
to the district) and at the same time required all federal government
sites to be ADA compliant. The next logical step is going to be tacking
ADA compliance to the E-Rate plan. Why get caught out by it?

David McCreath
Anchorage School District
http://www.asdk12.org/