Waste of the Day: Unneeded School Computers
Topline: The El Paso Independent School District bought $3.1 million worth of touchscreen blackboards and computer servers that were not needed, and left them in storage for over a year because there was no use for them, according to a recent internal audit.
Key facts: Federal Title I funds for low-income schools helped the district buy 3,000 Mimio Interactive Flat Panels — large computer screens for teachers to write on while presenting to a class.
More than a year later, 929 of the panels worth $2.3 million were still in storage. They had been meant only for core classroom teachers, but the district could not find a use for all of them. The panels were eventually placed in fine arts and special education classrooms just to use them up.
Forty-six of them were used to replace existing panels that were still fully functional and were only two-to-five years old. Another 125 were placed in schools that are now closed; the panels were left behind in the cafeterias. One of the panels could not be located at all.
“There are too many Mimio IFPs, and the district does not have places to store them until they can be deployed to a Title I campus,” one official told auditors in an interview.
The district also used local funds to buy 88 Dell computer servers for $805,000 in February 2024. Two years later, the majority are still not in use.
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Background: The audit comes amid major financial issues for the El Paso school district. A consultant recommended this May that the district should declare bankruptcy following years of overspending its budget.
The budget deficit — which district officials told El Paso Matters they were unaware of until this May — was the result of “the cumulative impact of delayed intervention, fragmented accountability, unrealized budget assumptions, recurring expenditure growth, and insufficient alignment between operational decisions and long-term financial sustainability,” the consultant found.
Summary: Every school district must properly budget its expenditures, but a district using federal funds meant to aid low-income children has an increased responsibility.
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