I just have to share this email from Mark:

Dan,

 

I wanted to give you a quick update on our licensing status for the current school year with a comparison to this same point in time a year ago.

 

Last year on October 1^st, we had a total of 5,642 computers and/or ‘windows seats’ licensed in LPS. Staff computers district-wide accounted for 1,513 of those, leaving 4,029 computers available for student use.

 

This year on October 1^st, we had a total of 5,770  computers and/or ’windows seats’ licensed in LPS with 1,523 for staff use and 4,247 available for student use; this represented an overall increase of 128 windows systems district-wide.

 

That being said, we have a total of  6,851 systems in LPS, including legacy Windows, ASUS, and/or other Linux-based systems. If you subtract out the staff-based systems for all of these (1,543) from the total, that leaves 5,308 systems available for student use, and increase of 1,279 computers (32%) over last year’s total of 4,029. Most of these are purchased ASUS eee computers (700+ and counting), along with Ncomputing seat additions and grant-based systems and donation from the LPS Foundation.

 

Given we did not increase the total amount spent in Capital reserve this year for computer renewal, I think we have done well as a district in providing additional access to technology for our students!

  

Mark Lindstone

Assistant Director, ITS

This increase was funded by a wide array of sources.  ITS seeded Ncomputing stations in each school and EeePC classrooms sets in half the schools by using E-rate refunds and support from the LPS Foundation.  We also participated in a CDE grant project with Englewood public schools where 5 of our elementary schools received funding for classroom sets of the EeePC.  The rest have been funded by school budget allocations and PTO investments.

Thanks to the leadership across LPS for seeing the vision and working together.  We are greatly reducing the equity differences across our district in terms of access to information technology while at the same time keeping our support demands manageable.