The subject of introducing Linux into Arizona schools has been a popular
topic on the list lately, and I just recently came upon an item that
came as a pleasant and altogether unexpected surprise. I lived nine
years in Apache Junction, and I recall during that time that A.J.
schools were not too highly thought of by the Arizona education
establishment (be that as it may, I always felt A.J. did a tremendous
job investing in infrastructure, particularly in the K-8 level).
I've lived in Scottsdale for 7 years now, but it was just a couple weeks
ago a techie friend of mine mentioned to me, as we were chatting on
Linux topics, that the A.J. Unified School District has been heavily
involved in Linux deployment within the district for the past couple of
years. I promptly jumped over to their website to check out their
technology plan (
http://www.ajusd.org/~hellis/techplan.pdf), and sure
enough, they're already into the third year of converting a legacy
Novell network over to Linux (the server count is 50/50, maybe more
now). They have classes for district employees in StarOffice 6.0, which
is the district's standard office suite, and they explicitly advocate
open source software on an equal footing with proprietary products.
Sample an excerpt from the technology plan, written in 1999:
>>AJUSD will evaluate products prior to purchase based upon the
>>following guidelines:
>>Does the product work in our current environment of Windows 95,
Linux, >>and NetWare? Is the product based upon open standards published
by an >>outside standards organization or freely available
specifications >>(such as technical data sheets or open source code)?
Does the product >>work properly with related products being used
throughout the >>district, other school districts, and the industry as a
whole?
>>AJUSD has Linux servers at each site to handle student email accounts
>>and web publishing. These servers are protected by a proxy server and
>>are monitored by local IT staff members.
The effort appears to be spearheaded by a Jon Castelhano, Director of
Technology for the district (Instructional Technology Department phone
number: 480-982-1110 ext. 2041). This is the only info I've gathered at
this point....and it's the only concrete example of Linux deployment in
an Arizona school district I've run into. I think A.J.'s location in
the far East Valley may have something to do with the fact I've never
seen mention of this before, along with their antiquated reputation of
being a backwater to the rest of the Valley. Obviously, things have
been happening since I left! It might be interesting if Mr. Castelhano
were approached to speak at a monthly meeting or the InstallFest, as I'm
sure his real-world experience would be an invaluable asset in learning
how to approach other school districts.
Tom S.
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Red Hat 7.3 Kernel 2.4.18 XFree86 4.2 KDE 3.0.0
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One Net to rule them all, One Net to find them,
One Net to bring them all, and Open Standards bind them.
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