Summary

Education technology represents a substantial investment on the part of school districts intent on following the lead of private industry in making computers an integral part of everyday activities. One study has estimated that placing one networked computer laboratory in each school nationwide would cost $11 billion up front and $4 billion in annual expenses. GAO found that the five school districts it reviewed--from a rural district in North Carolina's furniture manufacturing region to the largest urban school districts in New Hampshire and Washington--used a broad information approach to educate the community and formed local partnerships with business. However, funding from private sources for each district, including business, constituted about three percent or less of what each district had spent on its technology program. Instead, these districts relied on special local bonds and levies, state assistance, and federal grants to purchase and replace equipment. Lack of staff to seek and apply for funding and difficulty in funding technology support staff were major concerns of officials in all five districts GAO studied. None of the technology programs GAO reviewed had obtained a clearly defined and relatively stable funding source, such as a line item in the operating budget or a part of the state's education funding formula. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: School Technology: Five School Districts' Experiences in Financing Technology Programs, by Carlotta C. Joyner, Director of Education and Employment Issues, before the Education Task Force, Senate Committee on the Budget. GAO/T-HEHS-98-83, Jan. 29 (13 pages).

GAO noted that: (1) the five districts that GAO studied used a variety of ways to fund their technology programs; (2) funding sources included money from district operating budgets, special technology levies and bonds, state and federal funds, and private and other contributions; (3) most districts received a majority of funding from one source, although this funding source varied by district; (4) technology directors in the five districts have cited a variety of barriers to obtaining the funds needed to implement technology programs; (5) in all five districts, technology had to compete for funding with other needs and priorities, including school building maintenance, repair, and construction, mandated programs, and additional teachers to handle increased enrollment; (6) community resistance to higher taxes, according to district officials, limited all five districts' ability to raise more revenue; (7) technology directors also cited barriers to obtaining other sources of funding, such as business contributions or grants, particularly because the districts lacked staff to manage fund-raising efforts; (8) furthermore, some officials reported that demographics made them ineligible for some grants; (9) program components that were hardest to fund, technology directors and others said, were those heavily dependent on staff positions; (10) staffing was difficult to fund because some funding sources' could not be used for staffing and because some sources were not well suited for this purpose; (11) to support the ongoing and periodic costs of their technology programs, the districts planned to continue using a variety of funding sources largely as in the past despite some of these sources' uncertainties; (12) most planned to continue to fund annual ongoing costs, such as maintenance and technical support, with district operating dollars; (13) officials were not sure, however, how much these sources would provide in the future as program needs grow; (14) the periodic costs of eventually upgrading and replacing equipment, software, and infrastructure also faced uncertain funding; and (15) officials in some locations noted that at times major funding sources fell significantly short of expectations.