I will say this - I don’t think my school board member was eager to help me. He started by telling me the implementation of all this technology was guided by research. When I asked to see that research, he said there wasn’t any. Then the associate superintendent told me there really was some, but since I had mentioned other studies that claimed some of the research promoting computer use in the classroom was funded by those selling the computers and software, and were skewed, he said he wouldn’t show me his research.

I’m not kidding, and have the e-mails in my in-box. I’ve also forwarded them to my supervisor.

I’ll say this for both the school board member and this associate superintendent - both are approachable, and polite. There’s no personal beef here. Just an amazement at what I’m seeing at my child’s school, and a growing suspicion we’ve stumbled into a lot of expenses without any cost-benefit analysis. But now you’ve told me a lot of that is mandated by outside governments.

Most of the unexplainable expense that I’ve seen so far is for computers. They’re everywhere in our schools. Why? Do they make for a better education?

Seemingly not, as county SAT scores have remained relatively constant with a slight downward trend ever since 1973. With all the changes since that time, the explosion of population, and the technification of every classroom, those scores have remained stable, constant and trending lower. The average score on the original two sections of the test is 22 points lower now than 35 years ago. I was floored to see that.

How much have we spent on smartboards, computers, software, IT technicians to keep all that stuff working, and an entire staff headed by an associate superintendent to guide us into an even deeper computer obsession? I have no idea.

I’ve actually read the budget for next year, and the computer hardware and software alone is probably a couple million (those expenditure lines are distributed throughout the budget). A couple million dollars, in a budget that describes itself as one constructed in the most fiscally challenging year. The answer was to delay a lot of planned tech expenditures until future years.

In other words, next year we’re spending a couple million dollars and it could have been a lot more, and will be a lot more in the future, because of all the refreshes that will be put off. But don’t let those couple million dollars and the offset additional millions kid you - that’s not all of it. All this stuff requires salaried people to maintain it.

The budget says we have roughly a tech maintenance person per 1,000 students. That’s 76 of them. And if they only make $40,000 a year, that still comes to over $3 million every year. And then there’s the highly paid staff, headed by an associate superintendent for technology. I’ll bet the non-teaching tech salaries come close to $5 million a year, every year.

Since then, she has shown herself not only to be an outstanding campaigner, but an outstanding administrator in her position as School Board Representative from Neabsco District. She would have also been an outstanding legislator, given the opportunity and a fair fight. It really is a shame that we’re losing her…and perhaps Florida’s gain, although I hope she will decide to return when she is able. We’ll be here for you Julie!