Learning or Labor?
They answer the phone when computer-clueless staff in Issaquah, Wash., call to complain about e-mail problems. They wade through screens of program code whenever the administrative network at Irvine Unified School District goes down, cutting off teachers from attendance and personnel records. They install wiring, repair PCs and hook schools into the Internet in Jessamine County, Ky., whenever educators can’t afford to pay professionals to do the task.
They are a fast-growing segment of technical support staff--and they are schoolchildren.
“Our county is so large and so poor, there was no alternative,” said Bill Heise, 48, who launched a student-run help desk in Pike County, Ky. “Our staff can’t possibly take care of everything, and kids need this kind of training to succeed in the modern workplace.”
Finances aside, a growing number of school administrators--unable to attract experienced help and desperate to cut labor costs--are hiring kids to round out their in-house team of computer experts.
The trend highlights a problem that educators nationwide are starting to grasp: It’s not enough to just plug PCs into the classroom. Computers break. Wires fray. Networks crash. Someone has to fix them.
But often that person--the information technology specialist--is gone. At a time when nearly 350,000 high-tech jobs in the United States remain vacant, corporations are constantly recruiting and few schools have the budget to compete.
After all, a senior technology manager in education averages $56,000 a year, according to a 1998 survey by the trade magazine Infoworld. At a computer-related manufacturing firm, the same person can typically make $98,000 annually.
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Enter the students. The youngsters, often specially trained, handle tasks both mundane and complex. From third- and fourth-graders debugging computers in the inner cities of Kansas to an all-student help desk in rural Kentucky, hundreds of kids nationwide are now responsible for relatively complicated computer systems. Some get paid minimum wage or a little more, while others do it for class credit.
This controversial approach is tempting because it marries educators’ desire to make kids computer savvy with a school’s need to stretch an already limited budget. Such programs can offer an environment in which, proponents say, kids can tinker and learn in a safe environment. Machines are stripped to reveal their wiry skeletons; lines of software code lay bare for young programmers looking for shortcuts.
But critics fear that school officials are mistakenly lulled into thinking that students--though seemingly qualified--can replace a staff of experienced hands. Union employees argue that students should remain in the classroom, not on the payroll. Some teachers worry about security risks, while others see these programs placing too much responsibility and too much stress on very young people.
“We’re facing a crisis,” said Jamie McKenzie, editor of From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal.
“If we said that kids should be painting walls, picking up trash and scrubbing floors as part of their educational curriculum, parents would be screaming. Because we’re talking about computers, somehow that makes it all OK. It’s not. It’s exploitation.”
Little Money Goes to Maintenance
As politicians stump on the importance of computers in the classroom, they often ignore or underestimate the ongoing support costs in their legislation and local grant efforts.
In California, the Digital High School program is a four-year, $500-million state project designed to bolster computer technology in the classroom--but not in the back office. Locally, the Los Angeles Unified School District has about $325 million set aside to boost technological infrastructure. The bond money, which voters approved through Proposition BB, will help pay for the installation of campuswide computer networks, but not the staff to maintain them.
As more schools begin to access the Internet through a network--which demands more sophisticated support than a simple telephone modem connection--so grows the stakes if the equipment breaks.
“We’re working on a districtwide technology plan, and [support] is one of the issues we’re grappling with,” said Andy Rogers, director of management data for LAUSD. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s the right solution or balance.”
While more money is being set aside for technology in district budgets, there is little change in how the funds are being spent, according to market research group Quality Education Data Inc.
For the 1996-97 academic year, schools nationwide spent 73% of their technology budget--or nearly $3.2 billion--on hardware and networking equipment. Only 5%, or $211 million, was used toward support and service, according to QED. Though the overall amount spent is projected to have risen last year--$3.7 billion on infrastructure, $260 million on support--the percentages remain about the same.
Even the staffing ratio is far below par. Technology analysts note that mid-size businesses, depending on how the computers are used, usually hire one in-house helper for every 50 to 150 machines. But school districts are lucky to have one person for several hundred machines, said Scott Le Duc, author of the upcoming book “Student Maintenance of Districtwide Networks.”
“Educators are not businesspeople,” Le Duc said. “They don’t understand that they have to look down the road, to see what’s going to happen to their equipment four to five years from now.”
Employees Clash at Irvine Unified
The desire to “give back to my community” inspired Moe Farsheed to leave his job as director of Internet services for an Orange County firm in 1996, take a 20% pay cut and become the information services director for Irvine Unified.
The district wanted to create a high-speed network that would connect its main office and all 32 of its schools and offer Internet access at each site. The typical hurdles--paying for the hardware and wiring for the project--were overcome by federal and local funding and donations from the corporate world.
The project also created a staffing problem. In one year, the district’s already small technical team shrunk further, as several employees jumped to jobs in the private sector. The district, unprepared to hire new staff, didn’t fill the jobs right away.
Farsheed visited the local high schools, tracked down teens who expressed an interest in computer technology and trained them to work on the network.
After school, the kids would gather at the district office. Some were dropped off by their parents. Others caught a ride with Farsheed.
As with any other part-time job, they were paid--$6 an hour.
“I ticked off a lot of people by doing that,” Farsheed admitted. “We were creating a very complicated network and I needed more people to do the job. They don’t have to be able to drive to handle sophisticated programming tasks. They just have to be smart.”
Some district staff questioned whether the teens, though technically savvy, were mature enough to handle the job. Administrators worried that the system would suddenly have failing students making honor roll--think of Matthew Broderick tinkering with a girlfriend’s grades in the movie “War Games.”
Indeed, Irvine staff did have good reason to be suspicious. Last year, they discovered that one of the teens, curious about the system’s design, was stressing the computer network to discover its capacity limits. There was no permanent damage to the system, officials said.
Members of the California School Employees Assn., the union that represents academic support staff, reported their concerns about the teen workers to the district’s human resources department.
“The rest of us have to go through serious security checks before we’re hired. And here are these young people having access to the most sensitive material we store: grades, personnel records, attendance, personal e-mail,” said Janelle Cranch, vice president of the CSEA Chapter 517. “There were as many as six kids working--unsupervised, mind you--on the network at one time. That had to change.”
It did. Farsheed, who denies the teens ever worked without adult direction, quit in June to launch his own company, JavaNet in Santa Ana. The company does high-tech consulting work and sets up computer networks. The kids now work for him.
He and the district “weren’t debating over technological standards or how best to use computers in the classroom,” Farsheed said. “The problems were all too human: trust and ego.”
Learning to Deal With New Problems
People involved with computers in education tend to share a single, admirable goal: Kids should understand how to use PC technology. But relying on children to handle such tasks has created a philosophical tug of war, because technicians and teachers all too often don’t understand each other.
Educators complain that computer advocates expect too much from their young charges, who are, after all, still children.
Kids handle much of the PC “maid” work at L’Ouverture Computer Technology, an elementary magnet school in Wichita, Kan. Fourth- and fifth-graders swap out hard drives, fix connections and “do everything but logic board repair,” Principal Howard Pitler said. But when asked to identify the school’s worst technical problem, Pitler’s answer is simple: kids throwing up on the computers.
“Don’t forget, we are an elementary school,” he said.
Network specialists counter that teachers, wary of change in the traditional school culture, won’t accept they can learn something from someone who’s only 4 feet 2.
The Olympia, Wash., district is one of the early pioneers in involving students in computer network management. In 1992, two teachers and a core group of students set up file servers in five schools and started managing the districtwide computer network.
Students divided up the tasks of managing the network and maintained it on their own for about two years, until it got too big for the small team to handle. While there were some troubles--such as data occasionally being lost--the program helped prove the kids’ capabilities, staff members say.
Today, Olympia uses a combination of teen and adult computer technicians to manage the network. The program--now dubbed Generation Why--has expanded to include computer-savvy students in a slightly different job: Kids work one-on-one with educators and develop curriculum for teachers to help them integrate technology into the classroom.
“Schools must stop operating like factories, and start to work like modern companies,” said Dennis Harper, the director of Generation Why. “The kids are the ones in power because they have the knowledge. And if you can’t trust your kids, you’re in trouble.”
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Times staff writer P.J. Huffstutter can be reached via e-mail at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.
