Sandbox, a lot of schools don't have much of a budget for IT's!!! (By which I surmise you mean Information Technologists) My sister's school board, the Kawartha Pine Ridge Board of Education, which covers 7,000 square kilometres, serving over 44,000 students in 106 schools with over 8,000 computers, has exactly TWO techs for the southern half of the board (and two more for the northern half). And they're all using PC's...Needless to say, tech support is nonexistent. If something breaks, either she or one of the other teachers fixes it, or it remains unusable. Ontario's education budget problems are legendary, of course.
Compared to that, North Andover, MA is lucky, with two techs for 4,200 students and 1,400 computers in 8 schools (plus a couple of network managers and technology facilitators) but that doesn't even come close to the ratio found in industry - of about 50 computers per tech. Our district is 80% Mac and our new HS (opening in Jan. '04) will be almost all OS X, with the exception of a couple of PC language labs. Our techs have said that if they had to deal with more PC's than they already have, they'd be overwhelmed. As it is now, they're always behind. Right now, they figure that the PC's at 20% entail as much tech support time as the Macs at 80%.
As some of you know, North Andover was going all-PC at the new high school until a couple of things happened. I'd like to think that I at least had some influence (opening our superintendent's mind to the possibilities of OS X) - but a big part of it was our local Apple education rep's impeccable timing in calling and asking to do a presentation. The staff was already convinced - it was the administration that needed a big nudge in the right direction. They were also able to go and see a new high school in SW Massachusetts that had a fully functioning OS X network, with some PC's, and came away very impressed.
The lesson in all this? Apple needs to get OUT there and do their marketing - our rep has been wonderful (all of our principals speak highly of him). Dell and Gateway have been incredibly aggressive - Apple has to do likewise. Apple, if they play their cards right, actually still have the upper hand with some districts, because they're the known quantity and teachers are familiar with Macs. However, that edge is rapidly being eroded, as older teachers retire and Apple's years of laissez-faire marketing to the education market takes its toll. And, as always, it may take more than a little campaigning to convince the bean-counters at the top that spending a little more upfront can pay off big time in the long run.
