W.Va. School Board Wants $271M for Digital Efforts (WV)

December 23, 2010

The West Virginia Board of Education plans to ask lawmakers for $271 million to help schools statewide move from traditional textbooks to online content.

The school board wants to provide more than 300,000 laptops or other mobile devices to every student and teacher in the state. Board members also want to ensure that schools have enough support personnel and bandwidth to use new classroom materials.

Board members agreed Wednesday to ask the Legislature for the funding, although they acknowledged that lawmakers might not provide all the money requested, the Charleston Daily Mail reported.

"We’ve got to start the process right now. We really can’t move education forward without the funding," board President Priscilla Haden said. "It’s something that’s not going to go away. If we don’t push this, we’re not going to be able to proceed with any of our programs."

School systems need a dependable infrastructure before they can switch from textbooks to online content, said Brenda Williams, executive director of the education department’s Office of Instructional Technology.

A breakdown of the funding request that Williams presented to the board includes more $169 million for 282,130 "mobile student devices," such as iPads. Another $19.8 million would be used to buy 22,000 laptops for teachers.

More than $47.2 million would be used to hire 282 technology support specialists and 445 technology integration specialists for schools, along with $100,000 to train those specialists.

The Department of Education also wants $95,400 to increase Internet bandwidth around the state and $3.1 million for hardware upgrades, maintenance, Internet filtering and program licenses.

Williams also presented an optional four-year funding plan under which schools would receive $54.3 million the first year, $72.6 million in the second year, $72.9 million in the third year and $73.3 million in the fourth year.

She said the amounts would be higher in the last two years to accommodate Internet bandwidth increases.