Hamilton, Stevi and Lone Rock School boards place tech levy on May ballot

School board trustees in Hamilton, Stevensville and Lone Rock all voted in recent weeks to place at least one technology levy on the upcoming May ballot.

Superintendents in each district were clear these funds aren’t going towards anything new and shiny — these are technology costs that districts are already shouldering through their general fund, which also pays for costs like teacher salaries.

Approving the tech levy would ensure funds for things like software for attendance and grades aren’t taken out of funds which otherwise could have been used to retain teachers, superintendents said.

Stevensville outlined the consequences in a chart by year, saying staff would be on the chopping block in two years if the levy fails.

The story of technology in schools

In a presentation to the Lone Rock school board, Stevensville Superintendent Jon Konen told a story describing a “typical day in a school” and then asked board members to list every piece of technology mentioned in the story.

The technology included:

• Bus route software
• A program for hiring and recruiting teachers, managing substitutes and taking attendance
• A curriculum program
• An assessment program
• Payroll and absence tracker software
• Student Chromebooks
• Staff laptops
• Grading software
• Digital classroom boards
• And more

About half of these expenses were covered by a previous technology levy, but the other half came form general fund dollars, Konen said, which could be spent on salaries to maintain staffing levels.

“If all that is paid for out of the general fund, it's harder to recruit teachers, hard to retain teachers, to give raises,” he said. “It's harder to have the needed resources and get a curriculum rotation going.”

All three districts weighed what Lone Rock described as “levy fatigue.”

In Hamilton, board member Eli Johnson said voters may feel like the board keeps asking the electorate for money each election which may be frustrating for some.

“You've never given us any so that's why we keep asking,” Johnson said.

Voters have rejected the last two bond requests the Hamilton school board has put on the ballot to help relocate students from the current Middle School, which last fall had to delay allowing students to return to school because of a bat infestation.

Hamilton’s Technology Director Michael Schachte described the increasing subscription costs schools are facing a “moneygrab” from some technology vendors, saying price hikes aren’t all related to inflation.

“They literally stopped providing educational discounts,” Schachte said. “It's an industry wide trend. It's not something we can escape, dropping one vendor and moving to another one, and so these are things that I certainly didn't see coming five years ago.”

Lots of tech companies have also turned to a “subscription model,” like Adobe, so what used to be a one-time cost is now ongoing in perpetuity for access to the product.

Schachte also talked about the importance of not upgrading devices slowly over time so as to avoid having to invest a ton of money at once to update a ton of physical devices like student Chromebooks.