[ale] Atlanta school converted to Linux by PTA

[Daniel Howard]

Atlanta Linux Folk,

Sorry to take so long to reply to this, my inbox has been rather busy of 
late.  Yes, it was I and William Fragakis, two parents and now Atlanta 
Linux enthusiasts, who were tired of constantly running around fixing 
Windoz 95/98 problems, that with our principal, mounted initially an 
insurrection, and now promoted to revolution, at Morris Brandon 
Elementary School in Buckhead.  Current status is that our school has 
tripled the number of working PCs in each class with zero viruses and 
spyware issues, miniscule maintenance requirements, and yes, Atlanta 
Public Schools is looking at our school as a proof of concept project 
and believe it or not, is seriously considering whether deployment on a 
district-wide basis makes sense.  But we had to fight a long battle to 
get there.

There are many issues that are sensitive, and should be discussed 
offline.  The key however, is to have the support of the principal, PTA, 
and teachers at your school, and be squeaky clean in implementation. 
For example, we hardcoded the MAC addresses of every client to its 
server via the dhcpd.conf file, and turned off dynamic DHCP so that if 
someone crossed the wires to the server, it would not hand out IP 
addresses to the teacher's PCs.

The most important element that allowed us to recommend the K12LTSP 
software was the fact that teachers were only using the PCs for web 
browsing, office applications, and finally that the Accelerated 
Reader/Math package we had been paying for was now available in a 
web-delivered version.  That meant that if we switched to Linux, we 
could still do all the critical apps we had been doing in Windoz.  We 
started with the computer lab, purchasing and installing 25 diskless, 
fanless thin clients (to show where the future of thin client computing 
was going), and then converted the former computer lab Dell PCs into 
servers and began installing them in the higher grades, moving down in 
grade level as we went.  I sought the donation of PCs from local 
businesses and got over 100 that we converted to thin clients; we now 
have about 250 fully functional PCs in our school with a student to PC 
ratio of less than 3:1.  Teachers are now scheduling PC activities daily 
for students, since in a 6 hour day, each student can get up to 2 hours 
of individual time on the PC.  While test results are not in yet, one 
1st grade class recently got the top national score in the First-In-Math 
web site, and in another, some students doubled their scores one week 
after we upped the number of PCs in their class.  I also recommended the 
installation of a cable modem to augment our local bandwidth, as the 
district feed was delivering dialup speeds regularly; Linux + higher 
speed Internet connection gave blazing results.  We used an old PC 
running Squidgard/DansGuardian for web content filtering and site 
blocking.  Later, we converted the entire 5th grade to a single server 
to show the scalability of K12LTSP for reducing the number of PCs to 
manage.

Months after we initially offered to meet with district IT personnel, a 
meeting was finally arranged whereby we briefed them on the system and 
the result was a proposal, then counter-proposal, and finally a recent 
IT hire at Atlanta Public Schools who came to talk to us about it who 
'got it.'  She immediately asked that we meet regularly with her team so 
they could observe the system in operation, evaluate the issues/risks, 
and make recommendations to her on proceeding with other schools.  We're 
now working on a major briefing to district personnel based on the joint 
evaluation efforts of our parent volunteers and district IT personnel 
and the benefits/lessons learned of our project.

My personal hope is that if they do decide to move to Linux, I will have 
personally touched the lives of every child in Atlanta.  Linux empowers 
us...and I didn't really know that much about it when we started.

So, in summary:
1.  Get the solid support of the PTA, principal, and teachers first
2.  It's easier to ask forgiveness than ask permission, but make it 
squeaky clean
3.  A cable modem or DSL small business connection costs only $100 a 
month and combined with Linux makes web browsing blazingly faster.  But 
make sure it's filtered!
4.  Be prepared to address the usual onslaught of anti-Linux rhetoric

For more info, contact me personally.  If anyone outside of Atlanta 
Public School would like to see our system in action, contact me; since 
we're officially part of the system now, we'd have to go through them to 
help other APS schools.  It's truly amazing to see what happens when 
kids have frequent access to working PCs and the teachers can use them 
without fear of failure in their instruction.

Some fun anecdotes:

"We're never going back to the old way for our computers!"  Last year's 
PTA president.

"I'll take as many PCs as you can give me, now that I see that they work 
so well!"  A teacher.

"What's this new K12LTSP software we have to get trained on?  I just saw 
an email about training for it."  "You've been using it for the last 
hour to read your email on the web."  "Oh, I guess I don't need too much 
training."  Another teacher.

"You mean that's the same old computer that hasn't worked for the last 
several years, and now it works great?  What is this stuff?"  Another 
teacher.

"You know what I love about the new Linux software?  The educational 
application software is the same on every PC, and I don't have to find 
the CD rom disk, figure out on which PC it's installed, unjam the CD rom 
drive that the kids have jammed, and figure out which disk in the 
package runs the software and which disk has the bonus features."  My 
daughter's teacher.

"You guys rock!"  Many teachers.

Best regards,

Daniel Howard
dhhoward at comcast.net
404.264.9123