No Child Left Behind?

Used to be that kindergarten meant Crayola crayons. Second grade evolved to #2 pencils, fifth grade to Bic pens, and high school to word processors. Now, the K-12 sector enjoys computer labs, high-speed Internet access and software solutions that automate back-office processes. Not bad, but not great, either, when you consider technology in K-12 significantly trails higher ed. And what it does have is often underutilized, in part, because training and support is minimal to nil.

Some of the good numbers: Ninety-five percent of K-12 classrooms have high-speed Internet, and 62 percent have broadband access, according to a survey by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) of 455 key decision makers. The bad: More than half say classrooms are the least likely points of Internet access for students. The same percentage identifies integration and inadequate training as top challenges. Even Rod Paige, U.S. Secretary of Education, points to the sector as the only business still debating the usefulness of technology, despite numerous reforms and increased investments in computers and networks.

So bring on the VARs. After all, those challenges equal opportunity: School districts have technology they don't particularly know how to use; VARs can come in to provide training and ongoing support and services. You do the math.

But that's not happening as much as one might figure. At first glance, the reason is nothing new. Sixty-two percent of leaders surveyed in the CoSN study reported that budgets during the past three years have remained stagnant or decreased; President Bush's own 2006 budget proposes the termination of Education Technology State Grants, stating "there is no longer a significant need for a state formula grant program targeted specifically on the effective integration of technology into schools and classrooms." Not so, the CoSN survey argues, but the money being filtered into the military and homeland security has to come from somewhere.

And, truth is, money's not the biggest problem. Despite cuts, funds are there; the Enhancing Education Through Technology initiative, for one, provides more than $700 million for the use of technology to improve student achievement--with a said obligation of at least 25 percent to be spent on professional development. So, why isn't it happening? Because schools can't always get their hands on it. For example, funds for new schools come from bond measures, which don't have a whole lot of oversight, says Adam Robinson, CEO of Irvine, Calif.-based Govplace. But funding for technology in an existing environment--to address security, let's say--comes from different sources altogether and requires elaborate and lengthy justifications. Part of the holdup is due to the fact that funding for sophisticated technology solutions usually comes from a combination of state grants and central contracts, No Child Left Behind programs and districts' own school boards. Acquiring funds from just one of those sources can take upward of a year, and when training or services are involved, the ax often comes down.

For example, Bob Moore, executive director of IT for the Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kan., has a healthy budget that in theory enables him to spend at will on products. But funds for associated services--those that require people, essentially--are divvied up by the state. He buys Cisco routers and hubs, for instance, but can't bring in a VAR to actually link schools into a wireless district network. Instead, he goes to the state, requests the funding and waits--with no guarantees.

And then there are the gotchas, many of which leave VARs holding the bag. Take ERate, which makes K-12 schools and libraries eligible for up to $2.25 billion in discounts for a range of telecom services. The program will pay for a VAR to deploy, say, a network file server, but if the school decides to use it as a database server instead, the government can nix the funding post-implementation, and the VAR may very well be out the money. Similarly, if equipment funded under ERate is moved to a different district school a couple of years after deployment and that second school is not covered by the program, the government can come knocking on the VAR's door to get its money back.

Given all that, few can blame VARs if they steer clear of K-12. Standards and restrictions in the public sector as a whole can be mind-boggling--why further muck up the situation with federal funding programs that tie the hands of schools and even come back to haunt their partners?