Stimulus Watch

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General Description

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Points in Favor

It doesn't matter how much you don't like Microsoft or that Open Office is free. SCHOOLS need Microsoft office programs for a laundry list of reasons not the least of which that most businesses use it and students need to know how to use the technology properly. Not just word, but excel and others. Students who do work at home often have trouble getting files to open or work at school because of version issues. Updates are also urgently needed in many schools so teachers can use better programs at school. It is a pain to work on docs, powerpoints and such at home and then have to convert the files to an older version. Formatting or images are often lost. Teachers work 50+hours a week. They shouldn't have to spend ANY extra time trying to OLD programs to work. School/systems need to update operating systems as well, but that's another topic. Bottom line - why the heck anyone would complain about updating technology at schools that are supposed to prepare kids for the "next generation" of jobs is beyond me. Be mad that the school systems spend billions on poorly created textbooks because they come with most "freebies" instead.

Points Against

Software should be a regularly budgeted item in the school year... not appropriate for an emergency spending bill to get the American economy moving again. Schools should use software that kids can easily use at home also, and many can't afford Microsoft at home. OpenOffice.org is a free office-like suite that performs all the same functions and even retains your documents in the "microsoft office" format if so desired. Microsoft is a large, profitable company with enormous cash reserves; payments to Microsoft will have no stimulative effect and will only add to its reserves. There is no need for taxpayers to finance Microsoft, and there does not appear to be any economic stimulus benefit to pouring money into a software vendor that isn't currently in danger of failing. Students may be disserved by learning and becoming dependent on a single vendor's products. Advanced students or those with aptitude for computer science will be unable to study and experiment with the source code of Microsoft software, unlike its free, open-source alternatives. Microsoft is moving to the opendocument format that openoffice pioneered, so kids will be a leg up with openoffice.

This appears to be a "free handout" to a single business. How does this spending create jobs or otherwise stimulate the economy? Perhaps the 200k would be better spent on 3-4 new SysAdmin jobs to support the school district.