SFUSD is ready to be a digital district but it needs money

By: Laura Dudnick | SF Examiner 

Mike Koozmin/the S.F. Examiner
STEAM program teacher Jacob Aringo, left, speaks with
Hoover Middle School Principal Carline Sinkler as sixth-
and seventh-graders participate in the STEAM program
where on this day they were learning to create circuits.

Last school year, Grey Todd, a math and sciences teacher at Presidio Middle School, finally had enough computers in his classroom for each student. However, after spending nearly a decade gradually adding the machines, they were outdated.

"I started out eight years ago with a few computers in my classroom that I bought on my own," said Todd, who teaches sixth- and seventh-graders in the San Francisco Unified School District. "Last year, I had enough for a computer for each kid, but they were very old [and] running Windows XP, [which is] no longer supported by Microsoft."

Todd is not the only public-school teacher in San Francisco to see firsthand the lack of state and federal money for technology advances in the classroom. While recently allocated state funding provides every public school in The City with at least one cart of devices for taking the California's new online standardized tests -- a total of 4,646 devices districtwide -- fewer than 3 percent of public-school students in The City are issued personal technology devices to use during instruction.

Read more at www.sfusd.edu

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