Death of an Open Source Project

[cprofitt]

I am not sure if it is too late to see if the LoCo could get involved in helping to save this project, but I thought I would post and give you all the information.

After over two year of providing reliable, accessible and safe technology to over 110 students and 8 faculty members, the Linux Thin Client Network at Liberty High School in Benicia was shut down at the end of last semester. Not that the technology failed to deliver; total cost of the project over the two years including new servers (4), network switches (4), PXE NICs (20), recycled workstations used as thin client terminals (55) and consulting time (setup, installation and 2-years maintenance) was just under $20,000. The school recently installed a Windows "media" Lab consisting of 8 workstations for $10,000; just hardware. No servers, infrastructure, setup or maintenance.

link (http://community.k12opensource.com/profiles/blogs/death-of-an-open-source)

[rlt]

I graduated from that school district, and have kept close contact with them, so I'm in a pretty good position to discuss this.

As you can tell from the article, BUSD has had plenty of staff retire over the last few years. About a year or two ago, they got a new IT Director, as the article mentions.

Since this new Director came on board, the Windows Active Directory system used by BUSD has been very radically changed, the school system has switched from their old school administration software (SASI) to a new one (PowerSchool), and large changes have been made elsewhere in the district.

As it stands right now, there are only a handful of IT staff. One is working full-time on ironing out the problems with PowerSchool. One is putting out fires in their network infrastructure and various important computer systems. Some of the individual schools within the district have one IT person whose main job is educating teachers about computers (I don't think any of them do much more than that, though I haven't had much contact with them, so I might be wrong.). And finally, there's the IT director. To my knowledge, none of these people know much of anything about Linux or would be willing or able to support it.

I suspect that, considering their IT staff's lack of Linux advocacy or ability, and that they're busy with other problems, and given quotes like this:

The new IT Directory refused to accept the Linux network and flatly ignored any attempts to work together in integrating his new Windows infrastructure with the Linux network.

getting Linux back into BUSD would be a huge, politically-charged, and probably futile task. By "politically-charged" I mean that BUSD is one of those districts with a ridiculous power dynamic, where different people constantly jostle for credit, power, oversight, and money; this is aggravated by recent budget problems within the district. Not really a good place for an "outsider" to start making suggestions, because said suggestions would likely be regarded as threatening.

If someone did want to take a crack at this, they could try getting funding and support for it from Benicia Ed Fund ( http://www.beniciaeducationfoundation.org/ ), which is a relatively-new organization that seems to be trying to raise money for library and tech programs. I haven't interacted with them, but have heard from some people that they've been used as a kind of "wedge for change" in the past.

I moved to the next county over a few months ago, and therefore am not in much contact with people in BUSD these days. I might go back there next week and talk to some people about it, but I don't anticipate much coming out of it.