In a daily reality of on-going recession and cuts on education funds on the one hand, but educational technology innovation on the other, teachers find it harder and harder to provide their students with basic technological tools such as computers.

Read the following passage taken from huffington post , where you can find the whole article (Posted 10/26/2012), about  what Liz Byron, a Boston Public School teacher, did in order to offer her students the resources she thinks they deserve.

“Boston Public School teacher Liz Byron has had enough with the lack of resources holding her students back. She’s frustrated with the fact that in a digital era, her 42 sixth-grade students only have four laptops to share in school.

So the 28-year-old Gardner Pilot Academy special education teacher is taking the matter into her own hands — by embarking on a 155-mile ultramarathon through the Sahara desert to raise $50,000 for 30 new laptops for her students, WBZ reports. The Marathon Des Sables is the equivalent of six regular marathons, and takes place over six days every year in Morocco. It’s considered the toughest foot race in the world in which runners endure 120-degree heat, sand storms and run between 26 and 50 miles daily.”

As Byron writes on her CrowdRise fundraising page  “…providing exemplary, full service education to high need, low-income public school students presents a greater challenge.”

Located in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, Gardner Pilot Academy is a full-service community school that serves nearly 350 students in pre-kindergarten (K1) through grade 7, with plans to add grade 8 in 2014. According to  huffington post’s article Gardner Pilot Academy’s student body is 92 percent at or below the poverty line. 

Finally, Liz Byron did it. She managed to raise the funds and purchase “… thirty laptops earlier this year” (cited from http://www.connollyforboston.com). However, crucial questions arise:  If Schools are fundamental pillars to the society and economy, why does worldwide economy favor the well-being of numbers  rather than institutions? Do schools have to turn into sponsored fund-raising organizations in order to survive? Isn’t education among public goods that have to be provided by the State? How far is a teacher pushed to go in order to get basic equipment? What is basic school equipment and contemporary skills considered to be today? Will we all be “running” in a while?

Well, we Greek teachers don’t run under such risk. School is shrinking, limited to very, very basic curriculum subjects. With the recent dismissals of Technical Education Teachers due to abolition of the relevant High School Technical Sectors, the decrease of Foreign Languages and ICT in the curriculum schedule, we not only cut down on staff expenses, but also on money-consuming ,sophisticated, mind-hassling equipment that these and –oddly probably- all other subjects need to have in schools. A blackboard and some chalk will do.

Watch these two relevant videos 

Read an interview that Liz Byron gave to The Boston Glove here.

SOURCES:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/26/liz-byron-boston-teacher-_n_2024442.html

http://www.crowdrise.com/wwwrunthesaharacom

http://www.gardnerpilotacademy.org/2012/09/runforlaptops/