It's a case of hard drives overwhelming humans.
Lawrence Supt. Randy Weseman is prepared to ask the school board for a moratorium on expansion of the district's computer collection unless board members approve hiring additional technicians to service equipment in schools.
"We need to add three technicians now just to keep these computers working," he said.
Weseman said steady acquisition of computers for teachers and students the past couple of years has eclipsed ability of technology staff to maintain the system.
The district's ratio of field technicians to computers is about 1-to-600. Hiring five new technicians would allow the district to operate with a ratio of 1-to-300.
However, a stopgap proposal presented to the district's budget committee calls for allocation of $90,000 to bring in three technicians.
The situation is made complex by the district's desire to reduce expenditures by as much as $2.4 million in the 2002-03 school year. That target assumes there will be little or no increase in state funding for public education, which means budget enhancements in the Lawrence district must be derived from reallocation from programs or salaries.
The budget committee is evaluating spending requests and ways of reducing expenditures but hasn't made recommendations to the board.
Mike Eltschinger, the district's supervisor of instructional computing, said the district dispatches its five technicians each day on school computer-maintenance missions. On his desk Tuesday were 78 work orders for that work. At the beginning of each school year, he said, the staff lags about 200 orders behind.
"The question is: How quickly can we get to the 78 orders?" Eltschinger said. "Ideally, we get to them in 24 hours at the latest. But, depending on the order, it could be a few days."
On Tuesday afternoon, technicians were working on computers at Cordley, New York and Prairie Park schools.
Eltschinger said the workload had become so large that technical support staff should be part of any proposal to expand the district's computer system.
"Our goal would be to try to maintain and improve what we have," Eltschinger said.
He said the district faced other difficult budget questions related to instructional computing.
A computer virus protection contract will soon expire. The current two-year deal cost the district $20,000. That same package would cost $91,000 if renewed. A slimmed down version of the existing plan would be about $70,000.
"That's a significant chunk of money that we don't have in the budget," Eltschinger said.
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