A Montgomery County Council recommendation to delay computer upgrades in the public schools would save millions of dollars in the fiscal 2010 budget, but has educators crying harm to students.
“There would be a very serious adverse impact on the instructional program,” said school board President Shirley Brandman at a Wednesday meeting of the council’s education committee.
Committee Chairwoman Valerie Ervin said she wasn’t convinced students would suffer irreparably and added that other county agencies would be forced to do the same.
“I don’t think adding one year to the replacement cycle has enough of an adverse impact to forgo a $2.4 million cut,” Ervin said.
Superintendent Jerry Weast said the school system requires a different fiscal approach from other agencies partly because it’s most affected by the county’s demographic changes. More technology, he said, would allow the school system to engage students with limited English and those from impoverished backgrounds.
“Sometimes our theory of equal treatment as unequal treatment applies,” Weast said. “How to deal with increasing enrollment without increasing staff — [technology] is a part of that.”
Upgrades have included more and newer computers, as well as the addition of nearly 2,600 interactive white boards at the start of the school year. If the education committee’s recommendation for a delay is approved, modernization would occur over the next five years instead of four.
While the central office touts the popularity of technology in the classrooms, some argue it can amount to a waste of money.
“Of course the school board wants to spend on technological gadgets, because spending on things like making class sizes smaller or giving teachers more preparation time is extremely challenging,” said Cliff Stoll, a physics professor at the University of California-Berkeley and the author of “High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don’t Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian.”
Stoll ran through a historical litany of technologies aimed at saving schools and “making learning fun,” from film strips to VCRs to the mad push beginning in the late 1990s to wire every classroom with Internet connectivity.
“With all that, have schools made a huge amount of progress? No.”
