School Board Considers Purchase of Laptops For H.S. Teachers

The Haverford Township School Board on Thursday night also listened to presentation on a technology proposal which they will vote on at the board’s Aug. 4 meeting.

Jane Greenspun, the school district’s director of technology services, said Technology Services is proposing financing for two goals which are part of the district strategic plan for 2009-2013

One of the goals is to replace teachers’ computers with laptops.

The district has done this at the elementary school level and through a gradual process at the middle school, so the next step is to obtain laptops and docking stations for high school teachers, Greenspun said.

Greenspun asked the board to consider a proposal to purchase 122 laptops for the high school teachers, at a cost of $939 per laptop, and 123 docking stations, at a cost of $108 per station.

Under the proposal, the district would pay $40,324 annually for three years for the laptops, and $4,675 annually for three years for the docking stations, with the three-year lease payments for the laptops and the docking stations totaling $127,842, Greenspun said.

The other goal is the “virtualization” district servers, Greenspun said, defining virtualization as “the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources.”

The school district currently has 24 separate servers, Greenspun said.

“That’s a tremendous amount of work updating 24 individual servers,” Greenspun said.

The proposed “virtualization” would allow 24 box servers to be placed on hardware which Greenspun described as “blades” and incorporated into the virtual server.

“We can put multiple servers onto those blades,” Greenspun said.  “We’d like to bundle these, so to speak and take advantage of all the abilities of a virtual high server.”

Greenspun said the target is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalabilitiy and work loads.

Greenspun said the cost savings will come into play over time.  She said an individual server can cost anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000.  The hardware and software for the virtualization will cost the district annual payments of $44,309 for five years, with five-year lease payments totaling $196,555.

School Board President Denis Gray asked if by lease, Greenspun meant financing, since the district would own the laptops, docking stations and virtual server at the end of the lease. Greenspun said yes, “lease” referred to financing.

The virtualization would have power and cooling savings, and the impact on the carbon footprint would be the equivalent of taking four Jeeps off of the road or planting 541 trees, Greenspun said.

Gray asked if the school board chose not to approve a virtual server, would it need to start replacing the existing servers.

“Most definitely, starting in September,” Greenspun said.