[lug] BVSD Windows vs Mac craziness

[William D. Knoche]

Gary Hodges wrote:

> I sat in a couple St Vrain district (Longmont area) meetings before the 
> election last year where the (now failed) bond issue was discussed. 
> Actually, it may have been an additional tax, but whatever it was, it 
> was looking for more money for St Vrain.  BVSD was consistently used as 
> an example of a district where these things passed all the time.  I 
> asked how much smarter BVSD children were than ST Vrain Children.  They 
> didn't know.  Can school districts have too much money?  At some point 
> there has to be diminishing returns on the dollar.  Is 3A a case of 
> money that wasn't needed now looking for a justification to be spent? 
> Simply updating all the Macs may not have been a good enough justification.

Well, a bit off topic but I am an education supporter.
I can't guarentee that spending more money will help kids get a better education 
but I can assure you that not spending the money will have a very poor outcome.
Colorado is in general one of the worst funded education states (Boulder is 
somewhat of an exception).

Everyone benefits from well educated kids.
Well educated kids,
  get good jobs and pay into social security, taxes, etc.
  they tend to not end up in prison
	(schools pay $4200/yr/student, prisons cost $45k/yr/inmate)
  they tend to pay attention to the democratic process and make informed voting 
decisions
   they tend to contribute more to society in almost every dimension

I have no idea what BVSD is trying to do. Maybe they do have good reasons to 
switch to Windows (though I can't imagine what/why that would be).
I too have always been confused as to why the district has consistenly refused 
the assistence from competent volunteers in this area.
When we first moved to Colorado I help network/wire several schools - we donated 
all the materials and all the labor. When we actually tried to take the next 
step and provide servers for each school we were refused.
I have tried several times to help with the webservers, email, firewalls, etc 
and have always been told my assistance was not needed or wanted.
Things got busier at work (my wife got rif'd) and I just lost interest and gave 
up. My wife, 20 years as an IT manager,  with some free time also tried to help 
with the same result.
We should take this offline but if others have ideas how we can make a 
difference then I am always up for another try.

--bill