[plug] [contains rant] Linux in schools (was: public company?)

[Paul Baumgarten]

As an IT Manager at a private K-12 school, I thought I might throw in my
two cents worth for this thread.

I would tend to agree with Leon's statement of sys-admin's being
co-opted teachers for the vast majority of public schools and some
private schools (generally the low fee paying variety but even some of
these have sys-admins from a non-teaching background).  Quite a lot of
the private schools are able to afford and do employ IT trained people
as their sys-admin's.

We migrated our server farm from NT to Linux almost two years ago.  In
return I received many comments from the key staff who were the most
demanding on the system about how much more reliable the network had
become.  Since that time the only noteworthy down time has been the
result of a hard disk failure on our database server (ouch) and a
Network Switch that went south cutting off half the campus for a couple
of days until replaced.  From the cost perspective we have saved an
estimated $7000 in licensing.

As a result of this, the powers that be are becoming increasingly open
to the idea of alternatives to the standard Microsoft approach for other
uses.... espescially when one considers that MS-Office licensing has
cost the school around $10K to $15K in the last 2 years.  The Corel and
StarOffice alternatives are the ones attracting the most attention at
the moment.  Corel offers very good site licensing for educational
institutions and star office, is of course, zero dollars for licensing. 
The other factor is that both of these products can be run on Linux.

At this stage we are in the planning stages of a dual-boot (win95/linux)
lab for next year.

Working in the educational environment I can tell you that the
linux/open-source approach is being watched with keen interest from many
schools.  The cost savings alone make them very attractive.  The key
issues that are causing restraint in moving across are:

* Industry acceptance.  One of the key concerns of schools is that they
should be training students with the packages used by industry - at
which point the MS monopoly raises it's head.  The counter argument to
this is that schools should not be training a package but teaching a set
of skills that are transferable between different applications.  Either
way this is probably the major stumbling block.

* Ability to use educational-specific packages that are only available
for Windows.  Products such as Wine and Vmware go some length to
addressing this problem but the perception that it could be complicated
to use (compliated=not just a single click to load my ms-app) is one
factor that requires addressing.

* Staff training.  Teachers don't want to look like idiots when standing
in front of a classroom of 14 yr old kids.  Many teachers stuggle with
Windows/Office as it is.  Changing to something else without proper
training and in house support would cause a riot.  This is the reason we
are taking a gentle approach here by looking at the dual-boot lab... to
later become a linux plus wine/vmware lab.

I don't believe industrial support tends to be a major concern (as much
as Microsoft would try to claim it should be an issue).  In fact in my
discussions with IT staff at other colleges I don't remember support
being mentioned once.  After all, compared to the "support" received by
Microsoft... what could possibly be worse?

As far as the system reloads that Leon mentioned we are in the process
of rolling out software that updates the Win95 clients on-the-fly at
system startup from a master image on a server.  Prior to this we were
re-imaging our win95/office97 student use workstations probably twice a
term.

-- 
Paul Baumgarten
Information Systems Manager, Kingsway Christian College
Email: paul at bauma.com.au or paul at kcc.wa.edu.au
Mobile: 041 994 2779