GEIS-新闻详情

D.C. public schools slashed tech budget ahead of new school year

2023-08-01 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

Listen 6 min

Comment on this story Comment

Gift Article

D.C. Public Schools has cut its technology budget for students by $9 million ahead of the upcoming school year, scrapping plans to replace aging laptops for students who have been using them since the start of the pandemic.

Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning. ArrowRight

The decision will affect thousands of students who will use the aging devices for another school year. District leaders say the older devices are still functional, but some advocates are concerned about their quality, particularly during a crucial time for students still recovering academically from the devastating effects of the last few years.

“It is the 21st century; we purport to provide a 21st-century education for our students,” said Melody Molinoff, a co-leader of Digital Equity in DC Education, which advocates expanded technology access in schools. “That means having a robust, stable technology infrastructure that is refreshed in a predictable manner and supported by the appropriate manner to do so.”

School officials say the fault lies with the D.C. Council. Earlier this year the council cut $20 million from the district’s current fiscal year budget — which ends in September — to give individual schools more money and satisfy a new budget model that aims to provide campuses with at least the same amount of money they received the year prior.

Now, the public school system says that cut is preventing it from buying new laptops. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, however, said the school system can move money from elsewhere in its budget to purchase new devices.

“It’s real easy for DCPS to blame the council,” Mendelson said. “I worry that it’s not good for kids because if the adults at DPCS want to follow through to make the council look bad, kids are going to suffer.”

Previous coverage: D.C. public school budget proposal criticized for cuts

D.C. Public Schools had intended to spend $18 million this summer to purchase devices, including almost 16,000 new Lenovo laptops to replace older Microsoft Surface Go models that have reached the end of their three-year life cycle, according to a request for task order from June. In D.C. public schools, every student, starting in third grade, receives a device to use throughout the year.

The district now plans to spend about half that amount.

The remaining $9 million will go toward reimaging and refreshing the older laptops — a process that usually includes updating the operating system and getting rid of unnecessary applications to reduce stress on the machine — so that they can last another year. The district will also purchase a small number of new devices to replace machines that were either lost over the course of last school year or cannot be refreshed.

Reimaging can be an effective way to extend a laptop’s life, said Adam Phyall, director of professional learning and leadership at the advocacy group Future Ready Schools. Phyall has also worked with school districts to expand technology access for students. But keeping devices around for too long could also create a security risk, he said.

“As machines get older, they’re not able to handle the security upgrades, therefore, making them more at-risk to bad actors out there” who want to compromise student or district data, he said.

D.C. schools officials said the reimaging process should prevent security issues, but the older devices may be slower than newer machines — raising questions about equity. “The slower a machine is going for a student, that could be the one thing that impedes their learning process,” Phyall said.

Molinoff warned of potential gaps in academic performance between students who have faster laptops and those who use slower ones.

“Within one classroom, you get a two-tiered system where some kids are going to be using devices that are right-sized for education and then others are going to be struggling on these older devices,” she said, adding that the effects will be particularly acute for children who do not have access to technology at home. “That is not equity, plain and simple.”

The cuts by the council largely targeted federal coronavirus relief dollars that had been earmarked to be spent this fiscal year. Those dollars were pushed to next year’s budget — which starts in October — Mendelson wrote in a letter to Paul Kihn, the city’s deputy mayor for education.

Those reductions helped fund the Schools First in Budgeting Act, the D.C. law that mandates individual campuses receive at least the same amount of money as they did the year prior. School officials criticized the measure, passed late last year, because it overhauled an existing funding model the city’s mayor said was more equitable, and it has been a point of contention between lawmakers and education leaders.

Lewis D. Ferebee, chancellor of the nearly 50,000-student system, warned of “more significant impacts to DCPS operations” — from the elimination of full-time substitutes to delays in paying out teacher bonuses — because of the council’s actions.

“Under the Schools First in Budgeting Act (SFIB), we anticipate continued funding pressure for the 2024-25 school year (FY25),” Ferebee wrote in a letter to principals this summer, adding the situation will worsen when federal coronavirus dollars intended to help schools recover from the pandemic expire in September 2024.

There are more cuts to come this upcoming fiscal year, which starts in October. The school system will take a $20.7 million hit to its central office — which oversees functions such as human resources, but also certain school supports including technology and curriculum, according to Kihn.

“This is an unprecedented budget cut for our school system and poses a legitimate risk for our students’ educational progress by reducing targeted interventions and services,” Kihn wrote to D.C. Council members this month.

Those cuts are now forcing the district to make “hard spending decisions,” Ferebee’s letter said, adding that the council’s actions have diverted “funding from projects funded and managed centrally that directly support students and schools across fiscal years.”

Mendelson, however, rejected the notion that the council took money away from the system’s technology budget, and encouraged the school district to tap into $195 million in unused coronavirus relief aid.

“The point here is if they really go through with this, it’s the chancellor’s choice to cut digital, not the council,” Mendelson said. “And the chancellor needs to own it.”

Comments

Gift this articleGift Article