We’re seeing 1-1/2 percent of the gross operating budget of schools moving into technology support personnel costs. Another 1-1/2 percent of that same operating budget is being moved into upgrades, maintenance, obsolescence-type issues. We’re seeing a trend of 3 percent of the gross operating budget being moved into technology. That is an unbelievably large percentage.
         One of the problems we see is a lot of boards have not figured out yet that if I make a million-dollar hardware capital expenditure, how much does that affect my operating cost? I’d say about 20 percent. If you want to make sure that your teachers use that million-dollar investment, you’re going to be investing $200,000 for professional development and support people. Let’s say we took a school district and they had nothing at all. From day one, to upgrade the electrical power in every building, provide enough computers and data ports for a five-to-one student-to-computer ratio, a phone in every classroom, video, media retrieval-it costs about $25,000 per classroom to do something along those lines.
        When you multiply that by the approximate number of classrooms in this county, we’re saying around $55 billion to $60 billion to put that basic technology in every classroom. Then you have to add your computer labs, your library media centers and your administrative systems. We’ve done this study a number of times. We’re saying somewhere between $85 billion to $95 billion is what it would take to put technology at a four-to-one, five-to-one ratio in every school in the country and automate the libraries and administration systems.
         Of that total budget, 60 percent of it is computers and data systems and your wide area network (WAN) hardware. Thirty percent would be your video and media retrieval, or interactive video stuff. Five percent would be phones and 5 percent would be administrative systems. Another way of looking at it: $2,000 per student.

Another thing raises its head called wireless networks. Our response is:
        Have you ever watched a student generate a multimedia document? These things are 10, 20, 50 megabits. They’re monster files. Then our next question is: Have you ever transferred 1 megabit from the Web on a 28.8 modem? If you shake your head ‘yes,’ that’s what wireless can do. Now who’s willing to wait 20 minutes for the class to start because I’ve got wireless instead of hard connections? We don’t see wireless as an answer for the student side of the equation. For administration, for general file transfer, it works great. Between schools, wireless is great. But within the classroom, if you’re going to a multimedia project-based curriculum, wireless just doesn’t have enough "get up and go." The bottom line is we’re going to have to provide 30 to 40 data ports per room.

What types of things are you helping districts find to maximize their purchasing power?
      The first part is how they acquire technology. Right now, most districts, when they’re ready to buy something, they will either go to a vendor or an engineer and ask them to write a specification. In both cases, the engineer is going to go to the local vendor that they trust. These relationships are built on mutual trust. The construction industry works on a good ole boy network, that’s just the way it is-who has credibility. The reality is, anytime you’re using a vendor spec, it’s proprietary. If you’re using the local company that’s geared to do this type of work, you’re going to pay anywhere from a 10 to 30 percent premium to have the specs written by the vendor. I was a vendor for 17 years. I was really good at doing that. No one raises the flag and says "this is not right" because if one company is doing it for one county school system, the other company is doing it for the next one down the road. So if they start screaming about it, everyone loses.
       When you’re talking the larger firms like one of the Bell operating companies, Sprint, IBM-and we have data to back all this up from bid packages, people actually having bid on projects-you will pay a 200 to 300 percent premium to use them. It is huge. And schools don’t know that. Technology in schools is a very immature market. It’s not well-developed yet.