I am going for an interview later this week for a curriculum position at the district level. The job is overseeing the curriculum for social studies in middle and secondary schools in my district. Our district is fairly large, serving about 53,000 students.
In my interview prep, I wanted to be able to drop some bombs with regard to reforms in the interview. My big point is going to be about textbooks... getting rid of them. That's right I said it. Stop social studies textbook adoptions immediately and focus on bringing SS classrooms to a one to one. Here is my math that I have been using.
We enroll just over 24k (24,104) students in middle and high school. If we purchase textbooks for all of these students (we actually purchase more, since many students are enrolled in more than one SS classes) it would run the district about...
$1.6 million... based on a $70 textbook.
I say, textbooks schmextbooks!
We purchase texts for social studies every five years. Why? In the district's 163 social studies classrooms we could go one to one with netbooks for about...
$1.2 million... based on a $300 netbook. This is the bomb I am going to drop in my interview. We should stop textbook adoptions and put the capital into technology and professional development to implement that technology. The craziest part is that it would shave about $400k from the district budget.
Wow.
Any thoughts? Or any other ideas for the interview?
More to come...
Mike Meechin, M. Ed.
mike.meechin@gmail.com
twitter.com/innovateed
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2 comments:
I missed something. $300 netbook for each of the 24,000 students is 7.2 million. Who would get the netbooks you're referring to?
Hey AltTeacher...
Thanks for the comment. You didn't miss a thing. I was not as clear as I should have been.
$300 netbook for 163 classroom sets (25 each). We will start there... I def would like to have a true 1:1 as a long term goal.
Make sense?
Mike
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