School Technology

Education technology represents a substantial investment on the part of school districts intent on following the lead of private industry in making computers an integral part of everyday activities. One study has estimated that placing one networked computer laboratory in each school nationwide would cost $11 billion up front and $4 billion in annual expenses. GAO found that the five school districts it reviewed--from a rural district in North Carolina's furniture manufacturing region to the largest urban school districts in New Hampshire and Washington--used a broad information approach to educate the community and formed local partnerships with business. However, funding from private sources for each district, including business, constituted about three percent or less of what each district had spent on its technology program. Instead, these districts relied on special local bonds and levies, state assistance, and federal grants to purchase and replace equipment. Lack of staff to seek and apply for funding and difficulty in funding technology support staff were major concerns of officials in all five districts GAO studied. None of the technology programs GAO reviewed had obtained a clearly defined and relatively stable funding source, such as a line item in the operating budget or a part of the state's education funding formula.

GAO noted that: (1) the five districts it studied used a variety of ways to fund their technology programs; (2) four types of barriers seemed to be common to several districts: (a) technology was just one of a number of competing needs and priorities, such as upkeep of school buildings; (b) local community resistance to higher taxes limited districts' ability to raise more revenue; (c) officials said they did not have enough staff for fund-raising efforts and therefore had difficulty obtaining grants and funding from other sources such as business; and (d) some funding sources had restrictive conditions or requirements that made funding difficult to obtain; (3) to overcome these barriers, officials reported that their districts used a variety of methods to educate and inform the school board and the community about the value of technology; (4) these ranged from presentations to parent groups to the establishment of a model program at one school to showcase the value of technology; (5) the parts of the technology program that were hardest to fund, according to those GAO interviewed, were components such as maintenance, training, and technical support, which depend heavily on staff positions; (6) for example, in two locations special levy and bond funding could be used only for capital expenditures--not for staff; (7) in several districts GAO visited, officials said that staffing shortfalls in maintenance and technical support had resulted in large workloads for existing staff and in maintenance backlogs; (8) most said this resulted in reduced computer use because computers were out of service; and (9) as these districts looked to the future to support the ongoing and periodic costs of their technology programs, they typically planned to continue using a variety of funding sources despite uncertainties associated with many of these sources.