Birmingham schools among the firsts by Claudia Sonea

You have heard of bad management of cities by their councils but Birmingham's City Council overcomes all expectations. The local schools face many problems like funding shortages and less and less pupils coming to school, however Birmingham's City Council thinks more important is for them to get laptops that they won't even use because schools lack wireless networks and there aren't enough technology workers to train teachers. Probably you know the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, a nonprofit organization created in 2005 in order to provide children from developing countries new opportunities, access to an educational software. Usually the green-and-white "XO" laptops are sent to countries like Brazil, Rwanda, Mexico and they worth $200 a piece. Birmingham's City Council just decided to materialize a $3.5 million which involves 15000 of the mentioned laptops to get to schoolchildren and this way they entered in the history as the first US city acquiring the laptops supported by organizations like eBay, AMD, etc. It might be a good thing, but the laptops that have Linux as operating system might turn off users due to the more appealing Windows. Thus they will invest another $500000 to solve all the technical issues for the new machineries that will be heading to in grades 1 through 8. Virginia S. Volker, Birmingham school board member, although is enchanted by the idea of providing pupils with laptops, thinks that is a rushed decision and that many other things should have been solved before applying such a plan. Irresponsible or not, bad management or not, it is too late to change anything because the children are about to get an XO and will have the opportunity to get something for free. All that is left, is for them to enjoy their gift.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080305/ap_on_hi_te/city_cheap_laptops;_ylt=AjzTkQwicJDFd5Fnzn1GRNms0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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