Many criticize the way the superintendent let them know of his decision to switch schools to PCs exclusively.
By RICHARD BOCKMAN
Published October 5, 2003
[Times photos: James Borchuck]
5th graders Tonecia Williams, left, and Gabrielle Jackson, right, hunker down under their desks with the rest of their classmates while surfing the Web on their Apple iBooks at Sanderlin Elementary.
Matthew Fowler sets up a Dell 17-inch flat screen monitor at Lakewood High School . Lakewood is a magnet school for technology and has 1,482 PC's and only 11 Mac's.
From Apple to Dell
The Pinellas school district used to buy mostly Apple computer equipment, but last year, the trend started toward Dell. Now administrators are moving to phase out Apple.
July-Sept.
Apple
Dell
2001
$870,017
$233,248
2002
$573,243
$461,837
2003
$575,081
$885,279
Source: Pinellas school district purchasing department
ST. PETERSBURG - Tammy Gramlich lined up her Apples.
The technology coordinator at Campbell Park Elementary, Gramlich put in requests in August 2002 and February 2003 for a total of 99 Apple Macintosh computers for $114,444. She wanted to be ready when Campbell Park reopened this fall in a new building just south of Tropicana Field. As usual, Gramlich knew within about a week that the Pinellas school district had approved both requests. In July, though, when she requested $5,859 more in Apple equipment, she received no response from district headquarters in Largo.
July rolled into August. School started. Gramlich bugged her secretary.
Any word?
Any word?
At the other end of the computer pipeline, Cindy Seletos, the local Apple representative, was wondering why business had dried up. The school district bought more than $6-million in Apple equipment last year. For July, its Apple purchases totaled just $1,909.
What Gramlich and Seletos did not know, what few outside a small circle of administrators knew, was that starting the first week of July the district's purchasing department sat on Apple orders. By month's end, requests for $100,000 of Apple equipment had backed up, with another $150,000 purchasing knew was coming.
Superintendent Howard Hinesley and other top administrators had decided to take the district, which has two Macs for every one Windows-based personal computer, to PCs exclusively. Computers that a generation of teachers and students grew up on were on the way out.
Certain their decision was the only logical one, the administrators did not estimate how much it might cost. They kept the district's own director of technology in the dark, and they sought no input from parents and teachers.
When Hinesley announced the change early in September, it came as a bolt from the blue, handed down from on high. More than the old debate about the relative merits of Macs and PCs, the decision sparked resentment and bitterness about the way top administrators manage the district.
How Hinesley informed the School Board that he was making the change is another story.
* * *
At Campbell Park,Tammy Gramlich waited five weeks without word about her request for Apple equipment. On Aug. 21, she called the district purchasing supervisor she always turned to for help, Candy Mancuso.
"This is confidential," Mancuso told her, Hinesley is taking the district to all PCs. She didn't want Gramlich to order equipment the district was phasing out.
Gramlich e-mailed Seletos, the Apple rep. What did she know? There seemed to be "some truth" to it, Seletos wrote back. Exactly what, she had not been able to divine:
"In my meetings with both Dr. Hinesley and with Dr. (John) Stewart, each mentioned the establishment of a review committee to pursue this. It seems to me, however, that the decision may have already been made behind the scenes."
Hinesley made the announcement Sept. 4. The next day, Al Swinyard, assistant superintendent for management information systems, and associate superintendent Jan Rouse outlined the rationale in a memo to principals and administrative staff.
Also Sept. 5, Swinyard met with Seletos, her supervisor and an Apple systems engineer.
"We said we wanted to be good partners," Seletos recalled. "We asked for the opportunity to present, to look at their issues and have an opportunity to meet with their executive team. He said it was something he was not prepared to do at that time."
* * *
Swinyard tapped a pile of e-mail messages. "There's a guy in here from Australia calling me a bonehead." Imagine that, he said, infamous in Australia.
Post an item to a Mac forum Web site about some school district in Central Florida getting rid of Macs and objections roll in, many armed with numbers to make the case that Macs cost less in the long run. Show us your cost analysis, they say.
Swinyard said his team did not work up any numbers. Why do that? This decision was "intuitive," a no-brainer.
A decade ago, the district used computers mostly for word processing and spreadsheets. Now they schedule buses, track food service, create photo IDs and keep up with all manner of federal and state accountability figures. A new program will automatically generate an e-mail to a parent the moment her daughter's first-period Spanish teacher marks her absent.
With demand on computers up and budgets lean, what's the biggest business in Pinellas to do? Keep two platforms, with redundancy and added costs? Or go single platform, integrated and seamless?
Swinyard said the choice is clear. Next, which platform? "Do we use the system that 97 percent of the world is using, or are we going to be the only large organization in the world that's 100 percent Mac?"
No need to consult teachers and parents, he said. He has known for years what had to be done. Should he have taken it to a committee, let people vent, then ignored what they said?
"For us to convene a group and study the issue for a year is just putting off the agony," Swinyard said. "Had we done that, it would have been, "You didn't listen to us. Your mind was made up.'
"I wish there was a way to accomplish this without people having their feelings hurt. We tried to accomplish it in as painless a way as possible. We saw it as just a matter of course."
Deputy superintendent Stewart, who handled the issue before leaving for a job in Gainesville, said which platform didn't matter to him. Just so it was one or the other.
"There was no effort to be devious," he said, "no effort to be anything but cost-effective and efficient and to bring the district to what's happening in the rest of the business world."
* * *
The Center for Advanced Technologies, the magnet program at Lakewood High School, has quite the streak. Five years running, a national educational technology group ranked Lakewood's Fast Forward the country's No. 1 high school news show.
In the mid 1990s, Lakewood was 100 percent Mac. Lou Zulli Jr., who manages the center's computers, considered the Mac excellent by itself but deficient at working in a network. He recommended switching to PCs. The center's teachers heard from Apple, then voted for PCs.
Today at Lakewood they count 1,482 PCs and 11 Macs, and word is, friends don't let friends do Macs.
"Since we've done it," Zulli said, "our teachers are 100 percent more productive, our students have soared in what they've been able to do. They've won all kind of awards in multimedia presentations in what is supposed to be Apple's domain."
Lakewood included teachers in reaching its decision; the district did not. Zulli said democracy doesn't work districtwide.
"The worst possible thing to make decisions about technology is to do it by committee," he said. "Technology decisions always should be top-down. It may be unpopular, but it works. You get more for your money, because you're not spending on redundant systems and redundant software."
Mac users, he said, have "an irrational love of a system" that Apple marketed as the alternative to the Orwellian world, morphed into Mac as the non-Bill Gates.
"This is the great Satan," Zulli said, rapping a PC in mock horror. "Dammit, it's a tool, it's a better tool, and it's a more pervasive tool." He gets off his soapbox.
"I absolutely am going to get crucified by my teaching brethren for saying this, I'm going to be a pariah. But it's the truth."
* * *
It's light-years from the job-prepping buzz of a high school magnet program for high-achieving technology students to music class at James B. Sanderlin Elementary.
Fanned out across the carpet, 21 fifth-graders play Beethoven Baseball and other games on the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's kids Web site. Every child is zoned in to a laptop. They're getting ready for this month's big field trip to see the Florida Orchestra at the Mahaffey Theater.
The computers go where they're needed, whether to music class or on a field trip to the Florida Aquarium for an animal scavenger hunt, the kids identifying creatures from digital pictures taken ahead of time.
"Throughout the field trip," said Sanderlin principal Denise Miller, "we had an awesome amount of engagement by the students."
Miller treats the computer as an everyday instructional tool. Kids shouldn't go to computer class, they should use the computers in their classes.
With her doctorate in curriculum instruction and special education, Miller participated in a federal grant that resulted in "No Strings Attached," a CD-ROM with lesson plans to integrate wireless technology in student activities.
Miller serves on an advisory board headed by Judy Ambler, the district's supervisor of instructional technology, whose peers presented her a lifetime achievement award Friday as a state leader in her field.
Miller, Ambler and her advisory board were excluded from the district's decision to go with PCs.
Based on her classroom experience - Miller paused to emphasize, classroom experience - going to a single platform is hardly a no-brainer. She considers Macs "a million times easier" than PCs to use and support.
She understands the administration's logic.
"In their viewpoint, it helps with data collection. But that's different from what we're doing," Miller said. "How you're teaching and learning is the crux of what we're doing every day."
She accepts the differences between the district's business and instructional sides. She does not accept the divide.
"We live in different worlds," she said. "They're operational. I'm instructional. We have to interact in order to be more efficient. I just wish we had some conversation along the way."
* * *
Tammy Gramlich will get the Mac server she wanted for Campbell Park Elementary after all. Purchasing supervisor and problem-solver Candy Mancuso found an unused spare at another elementary school and got the schools together.
Last count, the district has 50,465 computers, laptops and servers, 34,538 of them Apples. The administration stresses that users can keep their Macs until they no longer meet their needs, nobody is having a Mac "yanked" away, but the direction is clear.
For July, August and September last year, the district spent $573,243 on Apple equipment and $461,837 for Dell. During the same period this year, it was $575,081 Apple, $885,279 Dell.
The district's three-year contracts with both companies expire in June. The district pays 14 percent below retail for much of its Dell equipment. With orders directed away from Apple, purchasing director Mark Lindemann said the district hopes to negotiate a better discount and could open bidding to other vendors.
* * *
At the last School Board meeting, the president of the classroom teacher's association, Michelle Dennard, lit into Hinesley.
In a district that preaches a management philosophy stressing that those with a stake in a decision should have input, Dennard said, the administration did the opposite.
"In fact, Dr. Hinesley, it appears that the business operations for Pinellas County schools were considered more important than the workers who have to implement the changes and the children they serve."
For board member Mary Brown, how the administration acted was "more important" than the decision itself.
"What we have done," she told Hinesley and the board, "we have violated one of our most important processes, and that is allowing for more stakeholders' input ... "
"I do not want us to send a message that different members of the team are not important enough to hear what they have to say. We might come to the same conclusion, but I think they should have a say."
Hinesley, who is retiring late next year, answered that had he opened the process, debate would have gone on for two years.
"That's what would have happened. And we'd have had 95 percent of the users that have PCs that are parents saying, "What are you taking so long?' those that use Macintoshes saying, "I prefer Macintosh, let's keep both,' and those that wanted PCs saying, "Let's go PCs.'
"And guess what would have happened? They'd have looked at me and said, "Well, Hinesley just put that on the back burner and didn't deal with it.' "
No, he said, it's wrong to fake it, to pretend to take input. The superintendent is charged with deciding, he made the best choice for the district, end of story.
* * *
Hinesley's boss is the elected School Board, which sets policy. Changing the computer equipment the district buys, Hinesley said, is not policy.
He said he never sent board members any written information before he announced his decision Sept. 4. He said he informed them orally, during a July 28 workshop.
The meeting ran some 51/2 hours. During the morning session, members faulted Hinesley for a "pattern" of communicating poorly with them. After discussing whether to move to the next agenda item or break early for lunch, Hinesley said he had something to bring to the board members' attention.
The discussion lasted 45 seconds. Hinesley never used the words computer or classroom, Apple or Macintosh.
"Okay, let me tell you one that, I have one that I want you to, that I will be presenting to you that will be part of my improvement plan that I really wanted to get started before I leave, and that is going to one platform in our data processing system."
Chairwoman Linda Lerner: "And you'll tell us more about that?"
"Yes. I'm going ahead and starting that process because it will be, it will mean more cost effective, it will mean a lot of positive things although none of that is ever really, it's really an administrative issue, but I wanted you to know that I'll be doing it."
Board member Mary Brown: "Can you send us some information on it?"
"Sure, we'll send something to you."
- Researcher Ana Adler contributed to this report.
