Stimulus ‘boondoggle’: School board member details disastrous school computer giveaway
August 6, 2014
HOBOKEN, N.J. – When the Hoboken school leaders decided in 2010 to use a windfall of federal stimulus money to purchase laptops for all students in the city’s junior-senior high school, former board member Maureen Sullivan was the only one to vote against the measure.
Four years later, the district’s superintendent Mark Toback has deemed the initiative “unsustainable” and canceled the program, leaving school officials to explore options for recycling dozens of machines that are now collecting dust in a school storage closet.
“It was clear it was going to be a boondoggle and a disaster and that’s what it turned out to be,” Sullivan told EAGnews.
“The stimulus money came and it had to be soaked up … It was like, ‘It’s free money, let’s just spend it,’” she said of the board’s rush to dole out computers, which her colleagues on the board viewed as an opportunity to help the district’s mostly poor students keep up with their wealthier peers.
“There was just no planning or thinking things through logically,” she said. “In general, that’s how the school board operates.”
Before the plan was approved, Sullivan repeatedly highlighted the district’s already struggling tech staff, the costs to repair and maintain hundreds of computers, licensing fees for software, and the lack of a strategic plan for training teachers, but “it was just shluffed off like ‘Don’t worry about it, these things take care of themselves,’” Sullivan said.
“I asked what happens when the stimulus money goes away and they were just like ‘Our taxpayers will see the value … and pay,’” said Sullivan, a mother of two high school students.
“You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out it was going nowhere fast. They never wanted to hash out the negatives, they only wanted to talk about the positives,” she said. “Anyone with common sense knows you can’t just give a 12-year-old a laptop.
“Kids have all the time in the world to figure out how to mess them up,” Sullivan said.
And that’s exactly what happened.
According to the Hechinger Report:
By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs.
We had “half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,’ ” said Crocamo.
Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still… teenagers.
“We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”
Crocamo’s time was also eaten up with theft. Despite the anti-theft tracking software he installed, some laptops were never found. Crocamo had to file police reports and even testify in court.
That was only the beginning.
Students also learned how to circumvent software installed on the machines intended to prevent them from visiting pornography, social media, and other inappropriate websites. Crocamo disabled the computers’ webcams, but students learned to undo those controls, as well.
The added software also dragged down the computers’ processors, which prevented them from effectively running educational software.
“We didn’t really do much on the computer,” Michael Ranieri, a junior at Hoboken high school, told the Hechinger Report. “So we kind of just did games to mess around when we had free time. I remember really big was Crazy Taxis that we used play. If we found solitaire online, we used to play it.”
Many folks in the community also learned the district’s username and password and eventually overwhelmed the high school’s wifi network.
https://eagnews.org/stimulus-boondoggle-school-board-member-details-disastrous-school-computer-giveaway/
