Channel@Work Answers A School's Plea For Tech Help

The students of the Dayton Heights Elementary School in Los Angeles have a couple of new computer labs, thanks to help from Everything Channel's XChange community in a program spearheaded by solution providers and their IT vendor partners.



The makeover came courtesy of Channel@Work Technology Makeover School Edition, a nonprofit component of Everything Channel's XChange Solution Provider Conference.



The XChange community, including vendor executives, solution providers and Everything Channel employees, teamed with 115 teachers, parents and students from Dayton Heights on Sunday to put the finishing touches on the makeover.



The project provided much-needed technology for an elementary school designated as a Title 1 school with 91 percent of the students' families with household incomes below poverty level.

Channel@Work worked with the nonprofit L.A. Works to locate a school where the experience of a group of IT solution providers and vendors could be put to good use.



The two organizations decided to help Dayton Heights Elementary in Los Angeles, which not only has one of the highest rates of poverty in the Los Angeles School District, but which in 2010 is celebrating its 100th school year.



Dayton Heights currently serves about 588 students in Kindergarten through fifth grade.

The school's main goal for the 2009-2010 school year is to raise the Academic Performance Index (API) from 757 to above the state target of 800, and information technology is slated to play a major role in that goal.



However, until this month, the school had only a few workable eMac computers in its lab, and little else in the way of modern technology.

A major part of the school makeover was installing a group of workstations in the library.



Bob Nitrio (right), CEO of Ranvest Associates, an Orangevale, Calif.-based technology consultant, did the technology assessment at the school in the days leading up to the makeover to set up the project.



On the day of the technology makeover, Nitrio led a group of solution providers and vendor representatives to rebuild the school library's workstation area with six new AMD-based, all-in-one workstations connected to a new Samsung color printer.



Richard Hutton (left), responsible for channel marketing in Samsung Electronics America's Information Technology Division, said the decision to work with Everything Channel on the Channel@Work project was much easier than the shipping of products to the school.



"That's why we love the channel," Hutton said. "We can't ship our way out of a paper bag."

Gary Bixler (left), AMD's director of worldwide partner programs, and Peter Richardson (right), reseller marketing manager at Samsung Electronics America's Information Technology Division, help configure the library's new workstation center.



The work included installing six AMD-based, all-in-one workstations, configuring their network and Internet settings, and networking them to the Samsung CLP670ND printer. Juniper and Belkin provided products and funding to support the program.



Nitrio said that training on the new workstations will be minimal, as their Windows 7 operating system is pretty intuitive.



"I can remote in [to do training] if needed," he said.

A seventh AMD-based, all-in-one workstation and a second Samsung printer were also installed in the teacher workroom and connected via the LAN to a couple of printers.

Much of the work in the teacher workroom was done by Charles McLeod, vice president of sales and marketing at PC Paramedix, a Portland, Ore.-based solution provider.

McLeod said he was the A/V (audio/video) captain back in the fifth grade, and working in the teacher workroom brought back many fond memories, especially when he saw the manual device for cutting shapes out of paper to be used for tracing.



"I walked in here, saw this, and got frickin' goose bumps," he said.



The only thing missing was the smell of duplicator ink.

Nitrio, during his pre-event assessment, found out that a big part of the project involved Apple eMac computers in the school's computer lab.



Thanks to a friend's Twitter "tweet," Nitrio met Jessica DeVita, owner of Uber Geek Girl, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based solution provider with extensive Apple experience.



Prior to the actual day of the makeover, DeVita made three trips to the school to assess its 34 eMac computers.



The eMacs were about five years old, and were still under warranty, DeVita said. Most of them had a PowerPC processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 160-GB hard drive.



"But every single one of these machines was out of date," she said. "Not patched or protected. They desperately needed to be rebuilt."



One of the eMacs had a hardware issue, and she sent it back to Apple for repair. Apple sent it back with a completely clean image consisting of the old Tiger operating system, Microsoft Office, Norton Antivirus and the MacShield software restore tool.



DeVita and her husband and son then cloned the new image from system to system using Firewire connectors, and finished the day before the makeover just in time to beat the janitor out the door.

Richardson (left) and Hutton (right) of Samsung show off the boxes containing a couple of LCD projectors and 22-inch LCD monitors their company contributed for the Channel@Work project.



The projectors and monitors will eventually be integrated as a couple of portable projector stations that can be wheeled from classroom to classroom as needed.



However, they first need to be sent to Arey Jones Educational Solutions, a Southern California-based integrator, in order to be cataloged and get asset tags before being sent to Dayton Heights.

On the day of the Technology Makeover, nearly 80 of the students and their parents turned out to welcome Channel@Work.



While curiosity may have contributed to the surprisingly high turnout, the students were also happy for a chance to come in and help paint the halls of Dayton Heights as part of a beautification project to celebrate the school's 100th anniversary.



Leading the students in welcoming the Channel@Work team was Marie Leyva, principal at Dayton Heights Elementary.

Leyva (right) welcomed Nancy Hammervik (left), senior vice president of Everything Channel Events, a sister organization to ChannelWeb, along with other members of the Channel@Work team.



Leyva is new this year to Dayton Heights, after helping open a new school, Los Angeles-based Bellevue Primary, a couple years ago.



At Bellevue, which served only preschool through first grade, Leyva enjoyed a 20-to-1 student-teacher ratio and a minimum of four computers per classroom. She also had an aide who helped handle the software used at the school. However, when she took over the administration of Dayton Heights, she found a much larger student body with a 32-to-1 student-teacher ratio and little or no access to computers.

The main difference between the two was the ability to get IT funding for a new school, but budgetary concerns will eventually level the IT playing field, Leyva said.



"We had the money to buy the new computers [at the previous school], but no dollars to invest going forward," she said. "In five years, they might have similar problems."



Leyva said she has not yet seen the budget for next year, and is not sure how much she can invest in IT going forward.



"We would like to see someone to handle the lab," she said. "We had a lab person, but the position was cut two or three years ago with budget cuts. I have someone helping me apply for a grant to fill that position."

Helping with the painting of the halls was Eric Martorano, director of Microsoft's U.S. partner channel.



Martorano told the XChange community before the makeover began that the work they did in the end was not about the computers. "It's about the kids," he said.



After the event, Martorano said in a statement that children are growing up in a world where technology is part of everything they do, and that they need access to the tools that will help them succeed.



"Microsoft, along with our partners, is excited to provide these exciting state-of-the-art technology solutions to the students of Dayton Heights Elementary School to help fuel their learning now and for years to come," he said.

HoJin Kim, director of channel sales at Juniper Networks, tries his hand at painting a tree.



Juniper, one of the Channel@Work sponsors, brought a few of its local people to help at the event, but was clear about how much it could actually contribute to the work done at the school, Kim said.



"We lack skills with painting and building PCs," he said.

Steve Burke, news director at CRN, works with Dayton Heights students Katherine Quezada (in pink) and Nicole Hernandez (red) to complete a section of the wall featuring a dragon and a castle.



Quezada said she and her friends had a good time painting the school. "And we're excited about our new computers," she said.

Diana Ramos convinced her father Miguel Ramos to come to school on a Sunday to help with the painting.



Miguel Ramos said his family was very happy to have the opportunity to help out at Dayton Heights.



"My 17-year-old son went to school here, and we did nothing like this then," he said. "Diana was so happy to sign up for this."

Porsha Pearson, director of operations for L.A. Works, a nonprofit community organization that helped coordinate the technology makeover, told CRN's Burke that only 20 percent of the school's computers were usable. If a system broke, it was simply set aside, she said.



Pearson said Dayton Heights had stopped receiving funding for the computer lab some time ago after the Los Angeles Unified School District made high school technology labs a priority.



Pearson said it is critical that elementary school students have access to computers. "We all know how important it is that children develop computer skills early on," she said.



Pearson said that the students, parents and teachers at Dayton Heights Elementary School were very excited about all the changes made at the school by the Channel@Work technology makeover. "This project is huge," she said. "It means that every student can sit down in the computer lab and know that computer is going to work."





Besides the technology makeover, the project includes a year of IT support, Pearson said. That's critical because the students are guaranteed that the lab will continue to be maintained, she said.

Two Sierra Madre, Calif.-based artists, the husband-wife team of Andre Ominetti and Jennifer Lindstrom, spent some time at the school prior to the event helping lay out a rough sketch on the walls of the school halls.



The sketches, many of which were dragon-centered in honor of the school mascot, were merely outlines that allowed the students and the Channel@Work team to be creative, Ominetti said.



"We gave the kids freedom to do what they want," he said. "If they want to paint a tree purple, they can."



Ominetti and Lindstrom got involved in the project, thanks to a friend they have in common with L.A. Works' Pearson.

Your reporter spent his last few minutes at the school drawing from memory all the ways he could think of to say "Welcome."

The salutations express the hope for a bright future for the students who pass through the halls. But they also reflect the welcome that Channel@Work's vendor and solution provider partners received from the students and parents that day.