July 11th, 2007
More donation woes
I walked into the school on Monday for a few meetings and found a letter in my box from an upset community member whose computer donations had been turned down. At the end of the last school year, we set a no-donation policy, since we had actually managed to put together a reasonable lifecycle funding package and, more importantly, had sent several large piles of computer junk off to recyclers.
At one point, our pile of computer junk (which accumulates very quickly when you eke out the last bits of life from other people’s/business’s discarded hardware) took up a full garage bay in our old autoshop and was featured on the front page of our local newspaper. You can probably imagine that the headline was not “Local school in desperate need of new equipment, please pay more taxes.” Rather, we were perceived as discarding perfectly fine computers (you couldn’t see the Pentium II and Designed for Windows 95 stickers or the burnt out motherboards, crashed hard drives, or empty shells that had been cannibalized for parts in the picture) and then asking for more money.
Hence, our no-donation policy. No more junk piles, no more upset taxpayers or sensational stories in a small-town paper; just 3-year leasing cycles and modern hardware. This is not to say I couldn’t find homes for lots more computers. More in individual classrooms, computers for teachers to take home, computers for students who can’t afford their own, special education resource rooms…You name it.
So along comes a fairly sizable donation of fairly decent computers (Pentium 3’s and 4’s with 19″ monitors) and it’s turned away by the administration, fearing the creation of another pile-o’-junk with an accompanying front-page spread. In fairness, the administration has a better head for PR than technology and was in no position to assess the donation. However, it appears that policies are made to be broken. I’m afraid I’ll need to give our benefactor a call today and see what we can do.
Donations are as much about public relations as they are about bringing technology into the school. Those in the community have the best of intentions, even if they don’t realize the need for up-to-date hardware and software in an educational setting (if the computer is too old for them or their business, why should it be good enough for students?). I’m inclined this year to begin an actual community recycling program for computer hardware. If I can find the funding for it, we would no longer need to turn away donations if the donors realized that, in the worst case, their computers would simply be recycled.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
Subscribe to ZDNet Education via Email alerts or RSS.
