GILROY
– It won’t be long before every teacher in every Gilroy Unified
School District classroom has a computer at his or her disposal –
that works.
GILROY – It won’t be long before every teacher in every Gilroy Unified School District classroom has a computer at his or her disposal – that works.
The district plans to purchase 300 computers for teacher’s that could be installed by the end of the school year.
According to the district’s Technology Plan for 2003-06, 10 percent of GUSD teachers do not have a computer in the classroom. About 30 percent of classroom computers cannot access the Internet and 5 percent are not connected to the GUSD network.
The district’s Information Technology department conducted a survey of the technology available to teachers, using a format from the California Department of Education.
“The results of this survey, plus on-site surveys conducted by IT staff, indicated that about 300 teachers had no computers or had computers that were so antiquated they weren’t even compatible with the district’s system,” said Charlie Van Meter, GUSD’s director of facilities and maintenance operations.
School board trustees on Thursday authorized IT Manager Rob van Herk to solicit bids for the 300 computers, which are estimated to cost $450,000.
The $1,500 price tag per unit covers more than the computer itself. Servers, licenses for the servers and operating systems will all be included in the purchase.
“It is a full-blown turnkey solution,” van Herk said.
The computers will also be installed and set up by the manufacturer, which can be done overnight.
“If we can time this right … we should be able to have them before the end of the year,” Van Meter said.
While the computers certainly aren’t top of the line, they’re not at the bottom, either, van Herk said. Teachers will be able to access the Internet, district network and e-mail system.
A password will restrict the amount of software that can be installed on the computer, to prevent problems resulting from unnecessary or incompatible programs being used.
