Technology budget

There are many similarities between public schools and charter schools. Charter schools are still considered public schools. My charter school is part of the Adams 12 Five Star School District. Many things that the district has also applies to us in charter schools, but not budget. Charter schools receive the same amount of money as public schools. We get money from the state per student. Charters actually receive a bit less money because we have to pay for our own building unlike the public schools. Here is the main difference between charter and public: we have complete say over how we spend our money.

There is not only one person to decide this. That could be a very unbalanced system. The principal, assistant principal, business manager, technology director, and the technology team are in charge of making technology budget decisions. They also include all stakeholders: students, parents, and teachers, when making these decisions. It is a very collaborative process. We also have a school board that is very active in assisting with these school decisions. My charter school is only two years old, so we have had to make a lot of decisions about the direction our school will go in regards to technology resources. We began the school with a three-year technology roll out plan. It would have been unrealistic of us to think we could start the school with every technology we could possibly need.

As a charter school we have a business manager. This is a necessity for our school that public schools do not need because we are considered a not-for profit corporation. Our business manager is in charge of all paychecks, grade level funds, and budgets for the whole school. Anything having to do with money at our school goes through him. We have a lot of subcommittees that teachers, parents, administrators, and board members sit upon. Our business manager is in charge of the financial subcommittee.

As a charter school, we have decided that we do not want to follow the procedures of our school district. We want to do things our own way in the best interest of our students and as written in our charter. If the school district were like the parents of a family, a charter school would be like the teenager setting out on their own with no help from mom and dad. This means that we do not have access to any of the databases that the school district has purchased for all of their schools. This is a good and bad thing. It is good because we get to decide what databases are going to be most beneficial for our students and not buy databases that we do not view as helpful. It is bad because he do have to spend our own building budget money on those databases that other schools would get for free. We subscribe to a lot of really awesome databases at our school. Our school’s most expensive database is Discovery Education licenses. Every teacher in our school uses this database on a daily basis, so we think it is well worth the price.

Also, because we are a charter school, some of our district restrictions around things like blogs, wikis, webpages, social networking sites, video done by students, and video done by teachers are not the same. The teachers do not just run around and do whatever they want and teach whatever they want. We do need consent from our principal and from our grade level team before we implement any new teaching strategies such as teaching with videos. There are some best practices by the district that we have decided to follow as well, such as not using students’ last names or personal information anywhere on the Internet. We do put student photos and student videos on the Internet with the parents’ consent. As per our school administration, every teacher must keep a website with up-to-date information about what's going on in the classroom. We are not allowed to put pictures of students or information about students on personal websites or personal social networking sites. Our administration encourages school social networking sites, such as Edline or Edmoto.

Our school district purchases both Mac and PC computers and technologies. However, our school is strictly a Mac device school. We use iMac desktop computers, MacBook Pro laptop computers, Apple TV, iTouches, and iPads. We made the decision to go all Mac as a school because we thought it would be easier to have a more cohesive technology environment if all our devices were of one brand and could easily speak with one another. The technology provided by Mac, and especially the iPads, was just too good to beat and had to many excellent educational applications.

We do not have an instructional technology specialist on staff at our school. However, we do have a technology director full-time on staff. She comes from and IT background and not an educational background. She does not have a teaching license. She has many years working in the business world and in big corporations with different technologies, softwares, hardwares, and operating systems. Once we decide as a school on what technologies need to be purchased, she is the one that does all of the ordering. She also teaches professional development classes on how to operate all of our different technologies that we have available at our school. Because she does not come from an education background, she enlists teachers, such as myself, to help her teach professional development classes and apply how the technologies could be used in the classroom. We are also currently in the process of hiring another part-time technology assistant. With a school as technology focused as ours, and with as many technology resources as our school has, it is a very big job to maintain all of that technology. When I finish my instructional technology degree I do not wish to be a technology teacher or a technology director like we have in our school. I want to stay in the mainstream classroom and be a resource for other teachers to come to with questions about how to integrate technology into their curriculum.

Our technology director maintains all hardware devices in our school. She runs software updates on all computers, maintains and inventories all of our Apple devices. She troubleshoots and fixes many technology problems we have. When we have an issue she cannot fix, she is the one to speak with Apple or any of our other vendors to get the problem resolved. She has also trained several teachers, myself included, to be able to assist others with minor computer and technology issues when she is not available. I have teachers coming to me daily when they have questions about their classroom technology or when things go wrong with their classroom technology. When we have troubles with our technology that we cannot solve, we email our technology director. The administration has first priority in solving technology problems. After that, it is on a first-come first-served basis. Repairs come out of the school technology budget or the general school budget and not the grade level/department budget.

Our school district has every individual school building create their own technology plans. These need to be continually updated every few years. Even if our district did not require it, I’m sure our school would have its own detailed technology plan. My school has only been open for two years, so our technology plan is fairly recent. We have also been continually updating it based on the needs of our students. Everything we do in our charter school is very dynamic and flexible. It is all based on the needs of our students and how we can best accommodate them. Technology is no exception to this.

I am on our school technology committee and I am also continually in close contact with our school technology director. I am very aware of everything going on in our building in regards to technology. Nothing in our school technology plan was a surprise to me. I tried to be very cognizant of all our school technology because I think it is so important for our school and also because I find all of our technology as a topic of great interest.

We completely cut out the middleman when it comes to ordering technology. We do not need district approval to spend our money on different technologies, so the process is much easier and very streamlined for our technology director. If a classroom teacher or the technology team wanted to put a purchase in for ordering, they would have to get it cleared with administration and the technology director. The technology director then puts in an order directly to the vendor we are buying from. We do need to keep track of the money in our budget, so the receipt from the purchase needs to be given to our business manager. Other than that, there are no forms or other hoops to jump through when we order technology.