Schools are always in search of trends and community needs. Our job is to provide an educated and prepared workforce. We spend a lot of time preparing students for careers that don’t even exist and it is sometimes a guessing game. My day is spent teaching cybersecurity and was nowhere on my radar when I started teaching in 1993. As a result, we are occasionally wrong. For example, the time I got a class set of Palm Pilots 2 months before smartphones came out and made Palm Pilots obsolete. We also have a tendency to hang on to ideas and equipment that are not working just because “we bought them and we need to use them.” All of that is the prelude to one of my favorite stories of wasted money.
There is staff that is shared between buildings and has to travel. There are many terms used but in our district, they were called itinerant and worked between two or more buildings. Some elementary nurses are an example of people who sometimes work in two buildings. Often the itinerant folks are neglected and don’t have all of the equipment they need. These people also were a part of the Student Services Division and had regular funding streams but also had federal dollars to support the programs. In the mid-1990s a new but clunky device came onto the market. Laptops were beginning to make headway in the computing field and were fast overtaking written communication among professionals. One year a district-level administration decided that all of the itinerant folks needed laptops. So laptops were handed out to all and told they could now use these instead of the machines in offices to conduct business. What a great idea and innovation and more importantly honored the hard work these people did. Here is where things get a little sticky. 1) there was no training other than turning it on, 2) there was no wifi so they still had to go to a machine to do email, 3) they required everything saved on 3.5-inch disks, and 4) they were a Windows 3.1.1 machine in an Apple district so no one knew how to use Windows 3.1.1.
We spent a lot of time as technicians trying to show folks how to use this new fangled device. There was also a consideration of the disks and student confidentiality. The final group was folks who were within sight of retirement and were going to learn one more thing just for a couple of years. During the time we had one left in a parking lot, one left on the roof of the car as they were leaving, and one left a restaurant. This final point is that we were finding these machines in closets for the next 20 years as they were discarded and ignored. Within a year after they were given out I do not remember seeing anyone use them. We had to wait another few years until network wiring was in place and at least laptops had some value when attached to a modem. I named this approach to buying in honor of the person who bought these but I won’t share out of respect and that there are still a couple of folks who might remember him.