November 1998 – Steven Bauer sent the following letter about the York County, Virigina schools moving from an all Apple district (at least in grade school) to only Windows PCs.
I have been meaning to send you e-mail for a while now. Our school district (York County SD, Virginia) had been an all Apple Computer district (at least for grade school) until last year, when it was decided by the school board to switch to Wintel. I fought hard to convince them otherwise but to no avail.
I work at the NASA Langley Research Center. We excess a lot of computers as we buy new systems (primarily Macintosh). The local schools pick up most of our excessed equipment. I was working with my kids grade school. They had picked up nearly 80 Mac IIs, IIcxs, and IIcis (and a few LC IIIs) from our excess stock room. I had fixed at least 60 of them and upgraded most to Mac OS 7.5 or 7.6.
At the end of the 97-98 school year they got rid of all their Macs and went with Gateway 2000s. They have had a lot of problems with their computers ever since. They still have an Apple Lab (which they plan on eliminating at the end of this school year) and a CCC Lab with about 30 Power Macs. I volunteered to upgrade all of these computers to the latest system and upgrade their RAM from excessed equipment here at work, but I was not allowed to by the school board, because they say the systems are outdated and need to be replaced by Wintel machines.
Anyway, I have now been told that I can no longer assist any of the teachers with any of their computer problems (they are worried that I may add software or hardware (e.g., RAM) to some of the computers that might actually allow the teachers to use their computers efficiently).
I think that the worst part of all this is that the school board’s computer (or technical) experts and system administrators really don’t know much about computers in general.
In the last year, the Virginia Beach School District has also decided to eliminate Apple Computers from their classrooms.
Thanks for your time!
Additional Resources
- A Grant from Intel Reopens a Debate Over the Future of Macs at Yale, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1997.10.16
Keywords: #backwardmigration #yorkcountyschools
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