Inventory Shows an Uneven Distribution of School Computers
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
NY Times
Published: April 3, 2004

Computers are distributed among the New York City schools in a wildly uneven manner, a Department of Education inventory released yesterday found. In the Bronx alone, for example, Community School 234 has 40 computers for its 576 students, while Middle School/High School 368, which has a special emphasis on technology, has 543 computers for its 720 students.

But City Council members, who were given glimmerings of the survey at a hearing yesterday by the Education Committee, were skeptical of its chief finding: that there is one working computer for every six children in the public schools. Council members and principals said that figure seemed unrealistically rosy.

"I rarely go into a school that has more than 10 to 15 percent of its computers working," said Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz, chairwoman of the Education Committee. The Department of Education paid Dell, the computer company, $2 million to conduct the inventory, which was completed in February. Department officials and a Dell spokesman said they stood by the findings.

Kathleen Grimm, the education department's deputy chancellor for finance and administration, and Charles Niessner, its chief information officer, told the Education Committee that the Dell inventory identified 178,000 working computers in the city's more than 1,200 schools. The survey also identified another roughly 22,000 computers in department headquarters and regional offices, and 14,000 broken school computers.

The inventory found that there were more computers in elementary and middle schools, with one computer for every 4.98 students in kindergarten through eighth grades, but an average of 7.69 high school students sharing each computer. Those figures include computers in school offices that students do not use.

[Two Technology Administrators]. Ms. Grimm and Mr. Niessner testified that the education department spent $270.8 million on information technology during the 2003 fiscal year, about 14 percent of which went to maintenance and support.

Ms. Grimm told council members that officials were surprised by the age of the computers in city schools. "We have counted them, and that's the first step," she said. "Step 2 has to be an effort to upgrade the equipment and, of course, repair it." Ms. Moskowitz said she was also concerned with lower-tech issues, like the fact that most school computers are far from telephone lines, making it difficult to call help lines for simple problems.