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How Much Tech Support Does a School District Need?

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One of the biggest challenges school districts face is determining the level of tech support they need to adequately manage their computers and networks-and how much they can afford. Of course, from a Total Cost of Ownership perspective, if a school district does not provide adequate tech support, the district will pay the price somewhere: in a reduction of teacher productivity when teacher have to solve their own computer problems, in the need for additional staff training when teachers decide they can't rely on the network to be up, in the cost of wasted time and labor when administrative functions can't be managed reliably on the district's network.

From 1983-1991, IBM Corp. and Digital Equipment Corp. worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop a formula for calculating the number of staff needed to support a distributed computing environment. This effort, known as Project Athena, came up with this formula:

Staff members =(Numbers of workstations/500) + (Number of Users/1,000) + (Number of clusters sharing servers, printers and other peripherals/15) + (Number of applications supported/50) + (Number of distinct vendor operating systems and applications/1) + (Number of software licenses required/25)

The formula, however, did not include factors for supporting networks, phone systems or for providing curriculum support.

Recently, educators in Michigan have been working to update the formula as part of the activities of the Michigan Technology Training Resource. At a workshop at the 2000 CoSN conference, representatives of Merit Network Inc., one of the project's partners, circulated the latest draft of their modified formula for K-12 schools. It is:

Staff members = (Number of workstations and peripherals/500) + (Number of Users/1,000) + (Number of teachers/150) + (Number of major LANS, servers, databases, etc./5) + Number of applications supported/100) + (Number of staff required to handle telephone, video, satellite, broadcast, and other non-computer technologies/1) - (Number of positions outsourced or handled by volunteers) > total increased by 10-20% for environmental factors that significantly increase support requirements. Total decreased by up to 25% for low-tech districts and increased by up to 25% for high-tech districts, or districts with a goal to substantially improve their use of technology.

Merit staff who have worked on the project offered these additional notes:

  • Number of computers should be number of computers in full-time use, defined as the number in use 60-100% of the time during five business days per week.

  • Major applications are defined as operating systems, networks, major servers, district-wide filters, large databases and other large-scale applications. In short, "does somebody ever get beeped about it?"

  • Number of users is defined as the number of students, teachers and administrators who use a computer at least 50% of the day. Someone who uses a computer 10-50% of the day would qualify as a 50% user. Someone who uses a computer only a few times as week is a 25% user. The formula takes part-time users into account because they all require training and support.

  • The figure of one support person providing curricular support for every 150 teachers assume that each teacher would get one day of support per school year.

  • Environmental factors include the physical size of the school district, instances when the district has more than 10 buildings, cases in which buildings are old and/or badly wired, computers are generally more than two years old or not of high quality, computers are of a wide variety of brands, models and type, computer maintenance is not centralized, and there is a significant reliance on a technology-based curriculum.

The formula can be accessed by clicking here. The project's staff encourages comments and feedback on their draft formula.

Vicki Banks Gaynor, one of the staff members working on the project, said the formula is designed to produce "a pretty good number that will be a little bit of a stretch" for most school districts.