Chat Room: As Good as New
Recycled computers are a boon to cash-strapped schools
by Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2004
There's no such thing as a school or library with too many computers. We're still nowhere near the one-student, one-computer ratio that's ideal for our schools and libraries, especially those in neighborhoods where most students don't have home computers. That's why Computers for Schools (www.pcsforschools.org) is such a great idea. The nonprofit organization provides thousands of donated PCs to schools, public libraries, and homes of low-income families every year. Computers for Schools also arranges inexpensive dial-up Internet service for qualifying families. In Philadelphia, for example, families pay $6.95 a month to their Internet service providers—less than a third of what suburban families typically pay for similar service.
Computers for Schools CEO Willie Cade says that corporations and businesses large and small dispose of hundreds of thousands of computers, monitors, and printers every year, and that nearly half of these castoffs work just fine. His five-year-old organization, with offices in Chicago and Philadelphia, is what's called a MAR—a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher. That means that Computers for Schools will refurbish any PC that has a Pentium chip or better. (On rare occasions, it also renovates Macintosh computers, says Cade.) Before installing a new copy of the Windows 2000 operating system on each PC, Computers for Schools wipes the hard drives clean—since it's illegal to sell a PC with the previous owner's software still on it. The overhauled computers are then sold to schools and other nonprofit organizations for $150 a piece. Most of the computers are four to six years old, but that doesn't mean they're slow pokes. A refurbished system often runs faster than a PC of about the same age that's already in the schools, Cade says, because cleaning the hard drive and reinstalling the system software eliminates hundreds of small files that have accumulated over the years.
At the beginning of the 2003–2004 school year, the cash-strapped Philadelphia School District introduced a new reading program, Fast ForWord. This program requires students to spend 100 minutes each day in front of a computer, working on skill drills. The district needed lots of cheap PCs fast, and Computers for Schools came to the rescue, supplying them with about 2,000 machines. "To go and buy brand new boxes isn't cost effective" for Philadephia's schools, Cade says. "We can offer the district five refurbished PCs for the price of one new one."
ETrek, another Computers for Schools–allied program, provides free Pentium II or III computers to schools that donate their old PCs—most of which are dismantled and recycled as scrap—to the Oregon-based company. The refurbished computers that schools receive are frequently nearly new. "We get a lot of our computers from [PC chip-maker] Intel because they upgrade them every six months or so," says Jerry Westfall, eTrek's director and a former teacher at Tigard (OR) High School, who has shown students in 80 high schools how to do the actual refurbishing. In addition to supplying about 8,000 refurbished computers a year to schools statewide, Westfall has provided his old school with 10 computer labs, three of them in the library.
Westfall says that his work benefits both schools and the environment: old computers—in particular monitors with cathode-ray tubes (CRTs)—are full of potential pollutants, including lead and mercury. "If the monitors are still working well and are at least 17-inchers, we find a home for them," says Westfall. ETrek sends the 15-inch monitors ("no school wants those," he explains) and the ones that don't work to a recycling plant in Seattle, where there's a machine that carefully disassembles and disposes of them safely. Westfall looks forward to the day when CRTs are completely replaced by flat screens, which are much more environmentally friendly.
To locate a program like Computers for Schools or eTrek in your area, Cade recommends that librarians visit the Web site of TechSoup, the organization that oversees Microsoft's computer refurbishing program. At www.techsoup.org/mar/mars.asp, you'll find a nationwide list of recycling programs for schools and libraries. There's also a page called TechSoup Stock (www.techsoup.org/stock/default.asp) that lists software and other products that are available to librarians and other educators at hefty discounts.
