Guest column: Yes to one device per child, no to property tax increase

By Aditya “Doc” Savara

On June 2, Dr. Bruce Borchers, the superintendent overseeing Oak Ridge Schools, presented a 2015 school budget plan to City Council, which included a request for a property tax increase of about 15 percent. Landlords would presumably pass this increase onto renters as well.

The justification for this tax increase is to pay for thousands of touchscreen tablet computers and notebook computers: one for each child in our school system for most age ranges. The idea is bold and expensive. The revolutionary change is based on the following three premises:

1. Our children need to be “technology-ready” for the future with sufficient experience to make such technology feel “ordinary” to them.
2. These devices may have educational benefits in our schools.
3. When parents are trying to decide where they will live, parents might choose a city that follows a one-device-per-child policy.

I taught at Northwestern University, where I won department-wide and college-wide teaching awards. Based on my teaching experience, I was initially against one device per child, because I did not think such devices would improve learning, certainly not enough to justify such an expense (my experience is that better teachers and better students result in better learning).

But then I thought about it more, and I realized something: There are great videos online for subjects like the quadratic equation, integrals, philosophy concepts, how our government works, etc. Having a sample problem explained in real-time—by a great teacher in a video—can be far more valuable to the student than looking at the textbook and trying to remember. I know this firsthand, I have used videos of upper-level university problems to refresh my memory or learn something from a different field.

Imagine this situation, which I have engaged in: The teacher gives a lecture with sample problems, then lets the students work out more problems on their own. The teacher walks around helping those who need help and answering questions, while other students wait or struggle if they are stuck until the teacher gets to them. Now, imagine a situation where students can watch sample problems being worked out online, on a tablet computer, while they are waiting. The teacher still walks around, but now five times as many students can be helped at the same time, and the students being helped by videos can even be watching examples of totally different types of problems relative to their neighboring students. This benefit alone would be worth $500 per student per year, and our real costs per device could be lower than that. What about the other rationales?

Undoubtedly, habitual exposure would make students more comfortable with the emerging computer operating systems. The difference between a student or a worker who knows the current technology well and one who does not can be dramatic, and can play a large role in our students’ future. Our students will be able to accomplish more and will be able to impress their superiors at college and in the work place if they have next-generation computer knowledge; otherwise, our students may come across as underprepared.

What about the third reason? If I were not already living in Oak Ridge, I would absolutely consider moving to Oak Ridge due to incorporation of computer devices into the curriculum. This third motive that Dr. Borchers presented, attracting parents to our city, opened my eyes to our school system’s need to adopt a one-device-per-child curriculum in order for our city to remain competitive. But I do not support the tax increase.

I do not support the tax increase because not everybody can easily afford this. The tax increase would even be imposed on people who live below the poverty line! Are we really going to ask people who are struggling to help pay for the tablets of well-off families’ children?

Additionally, the proposed plan includes a request to hire several technology maintenance staff (many hundreds of thousands of dollars—not teachers, but people to call up when the computers have a problem). The money for this increase would then became a permanent fixture in the school budget based on state laws—saddling our city under the so-called “maintenance of effort” clause. Caution for hiring new costly staff is merited.

There are some city employees who have a track record of being good stewards of our tax money. There is an employee in our city’s IT department named Adam who has worked for the city for seven years and was promoted to a managerial position two years ago. He has been doing such a diligent job of turning around our city’s IT department, and holding our city’s IT consultants to doing a complete job, that I recently shook his hand after a City Council meeting and thanked him for the good work that he is doing.

So here is my proposal: If we need IT staff to service the thousands of devices we’ll be purchasing, and these staff are not teachers, then let’s hire appropriate technology helpers under the city’s general fund or a technology fund and put them under Adam, making the tech helpers freely available to the school system with no hourly charge. That will be a win for the city and a win for the schools. I believe that Adam will not ask to pay the tech helpers any exorbitant salaries (and City Council can make sure that is the case), creating a win for the taxpayers.

Dr. Borchers’s plan includes leasing the devices for four years, instead of buying the devices, since the devices might become out of date. This might be a wise decision if we can get a good lease price. We should be cautious as many computer leases charge the entire cost of the device per year. Here is my suggestion: Make a voluntary technology fee set at a value of 1.5 times the average device leasing price (with oversight of the contract price by the technology helpers under Adam), with the money paid annually by students’ parents who can afford it into a technology fund, from which the devices will be purchased for all students. Then, people like myself who want this curriculum for their kids and can afford it will happily pay a couple of hundreds of dollars per year per child, and there will be no need for a tax increase. We may even attract families who have bought houses in Farragut. Would parents in Farragut move to Oak Ridge for a one-device-per-child curriculum and pay a voluntary $200 annual technology fee? You can bet that I would if I was in their shoes.

Savara is running for Oak Ridge City Council, and he lives in Oak Ridge. You can read more of his views here.