Spending Bucks for bytes
One-quarter of N.M.'s technology budget spent in McKinley County

Ms. Susan Sommer works with her students in the computer lab at Tobe Turpen Elementary on Thursday. The McKinley County School District has spent 76 million dollars in the past 10 years on computers and other equipment, about a third of the total budget for the state of New Mexico. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Schools within the local county public school system are probably the most wired in the state, according to figures released recently by the school district.

The figures indicate that every one of the 12,800 students from kindergarten through the high school has a computer available to them at any given moment, whether it be in the classroom or in a computer lab or in the school library.

And all of these computers are linked to the Internet.

This has been made possible by grants during the past 10 years from the FCC’s e-rate program that total $76.5 million. And what’s remarkable about this is that during those 10 years, the Gallup-McKinley County School District’s share has greatly surpassed what every other school district has received. In total, state schools have received $329.4 million, so Gallup’s share has been almost 25 percent.

One reason for this, said David Oakes, the district’s technology director, is the fact that this district realized before many other school districts just what these funds could do and applied for them aggressively at a time when other districts were sitting back and trying to decide how much they wanted to spend on computers.

While the FCC picked up most of the costs, districts were expected to pay for some of the costs themselves but there was a caveat — those districts that had a lot of low-income families got a break, having to make a match of no more than 10 percent. This district, relying on the number of families that qualified for free or reduced lunches, found itself getting 87 percent of the cost of the computers subsidized.

But the district could have qualified for the full 90 percent, Oakes said, if parents for children in the school district would cooperate and fill out the cards that would qualify their students.

“Many parents failed to fill out the form because they know that their children don’t buy the lunches,” he said. Instead, their child probably prefer eating at the various alternative food stands available at the high schools.

But the district is now making a major effort to get the parents who have failed to turn in the paperwork to do so because it’s costing the district tens of thousands of dollars.

For example, if the district applied for $2 million in e-rate funds, at 87 percent, it would have to come up with $260,000. At 90 percent, their matching costs would be $200,000, a savings of $60,000.

There are other programs where the district has to match based on how many children are on the free and reduced lunch programs, so the district is being forced to pay more money in matching funds there as well, Oakes said.

“Every percentage point we get above 87 percent, saves the district $20,000,” he said.

Right now most of the matching funds is coming from savings that the district has incurred by putting up a system that allows for long-distance calls between the schools throughout the district to be placed through the Internet. That is saving the district about $200,000 a year, he said.

Most of the classrooms in the district, Oakes said, have at least one computer in them and some have two or three, depending on how the principal in that school wants to use the computers.

Some put less in the classrooms and more in the computer labs or the library while others opt to have more computers available to the students in the classrooms.

But even though the district is wired, the district is planning to spend millions more a year to increase the broadband capabilities in the schools to allow for downloading videos and to continue replacing computers on a regular basis.