Robert Pogson

Recently, the feds announced a fairly bland budget. The department of Indian and Northern Affairs, which funds the school where I work has announced no new initiatives with respect to Indian education except to study the matter. see http://www.budget.gc.ca/2007/bp/bpc3e.html#aboriginal for the current budget which claims $300 million per year was committed last year to a new approach to aboriginal education (yeah, right. This school is still using Lose ’98, cat-3 cabling and has only 1 PC per classroom. My last school was using a payscale from 1992.).

INAC’s inaction plan includes years of studying the matter. Well, they say June 2007 is the end of the task, so I am holding my breath with anticipation of the exciting changes about to sweep aboriginal education with innovation.

What has this to do with Linux? Well, I think that any organization so reluctant to spend money to upgrade IT in schools had better implement Linux far and wide because it is the only way they can do a better job for the money they spend. As far as I can see, these guys do not even budget to spend money on IT in aboriginal schools. If they were, the system would not be 10 years out of date. My school is funded by a payscale for 2002 and paying teachers according to the 2007 Saskatchewan payscale, so they have no money for books, computers, networking or any innovation. My science lab has chemicals and equipment that were bought in 1992. Some of the chemicals have a 12 month shelf life but we are still using them because we cannot afford new stuff. We have no projector, digital camera, or software that does not come with Windows or that I did not provide on my own PC. There was one PC in the lab when I arrived on a Celeron 1000MHz with 160 MB RAM. I plan on getting four old computers to hook up in LTSP using their own spare cycles to run the server: LTSP+OpenMosix. Otherwise, they will be back to one machine when I leave. I am also placing a request for Computers for School recycled machines.

Grim situation, but I have seen big city schools with good reputations that had not a single PC in classrooms. The state of IT in education is grim in Canada. We have 21st century curriculums specifying use of computers in classrooms and they are not there. I intend to change that.