Technology rules in 258

By ANNE KAZMIERCZAK
Register Reporter

HUMBOLDT — Technology — and its price tag — dominated the USD-258 school board meeting Monday night.
The board plans to spend about $62,355 to turn three high school classrooms into “tech rich” classes for the 2009-2010 school year.
Assistant High School Principal Craig Smith offered the board a breakdown of per unit pricing on the technology being considered.
Laptops, digital and video cameras, smart boards and software are all part of the package. But, Smith said, technology pricing is directly tied to the stock market. Since the market is down, the price per ram of computer memory is down, as well. “We’re not going to get as much advantage of that since we’re buying laptops, but I really think we can do less than this,” Smith said.
Smith will shop out the technology specifications to other vendors to try to find a more competitive quote. The specs will match those in the elementary building to allow the incoming class of middle schoolers to continue at the same level they are used to.
“You need machines with motion stability,” Smith said. “With kids, that’s a big factor because they’re moving them around.”
They will not use their current vendor, CDW, however, due to ongoing customer support problems with the company. “We’re gonna look for another option there,” Smith said.
Smith also discussed a potential savings in per-computer licensing costs. The district currently pays $40.77 per computer, but could get by with a reduced license for about $22 per machine through a different vendor, he said.
The board briefly considered reducing the number of tech rich classrooms to two, but decided against it as three teachers have already been trained to work with the technology.
That training came at no cost to the district, Smith said, as Elementary Principal Kay Bolt secured an arrangement to train the middle and high school teachers concurrently with elementary teachers who were trained to use the technology package.
The school currently has $536,286 in its capital outlay fund, said Superintendent Bob Heigele.
After selling the building trades house, that fund should rest closer to $600,000 he said.

SMITH LATER gave a presentation to the board on the “Kansas curriculum to produce a highly trained workforce.” The K-12 vocational education program, called the “Career Pipeline,” is mandated by the state to be in place by the 2012 school year, Smith said.
The program focuses on “high wage, high demand” jobs for high school graduates, Smith said.
The program begins with career awareness at a basic level and progresses with the grade levels, he said. For example, in an early elemetary class “You have the class look at a loaf of bread and discuss all the careers that go into that loaf.” Package design, marketing and agribusiness are all jobs associated with one loaf of bread, Smith said.
Higher grade levels must integrate cross-curricular programs or themes, he said, “Such as the Vietnam War. You talk about defoliants and napalm in science class, then the Tet Offensive in history and how a plane flies in physics.”
Under state guidelines, “Every school has to come up with a career cluster action team and infuse that into every aspect of the curriculum,” Smith said. In addition, some current curricula must be modified to meet the new guidelines.
“Family and consumer sciences now has to be 30 percent health care” he said. “There’s a lot of change and work involved” in restructuring the current programs, he said.
The positive aspect of the new program will be students who are more aware of available jobs and career choices, he said.
“Each eighth-grader will take an interest test to match their interest and skills to career options. If you have a C or D student who is interested in medicine, he can’t be a surgeon, but there might be other career options out there that still match those interest areas.”
Resume writing and financial aid application help are skills the students will learn before high school, Smith said.
“After they take their skills test the second time, they’ll adjust their schedules,” he said.
High school classes will be more directed towards producing a “career literate graduate,” Smith said.

IN OTHER business, Elementary Principal Kay Bolt was offered the positions of curriculum director and Title 1 supervisor, adding two weeks to her 2010-2011 contract.
ANW will freeze administrative raises for the coming year, said board member Don Hauser, but other than that “Our discussions on finance have been wait and see,” he said.
The immediate resignation of Missy Ferron, an elementary para educator, was accepted. Ferron will retain her school bus driver duties. The early retirement of Lance Carlson, high school social studies teacher, was accepted, effective at the end of this school year.
The schools will review their security practices after an evaluation was done by the district’s insurance company. “A lot of things, because of our clientele, we probably don’t need to do, but we should look at what we can,” to increase school security Heigele said.