Going to the Cloud

As a grade 11–12 business teacher, I used to photocopy important notes and worksheets to distribute to the students. When I calculated the cost of all these photocopies, I was shocked to find that each student was receiving about 1,000 photocopies a year in my classes alone. With four classes of 30 students each, I realized that my photocopy expense each year was about 120,000 Indian rupees (around $2,685 in U.S. dollars). Other teachers in my school followed the same practice, incurring similar expenses. We needed a solution.

Cloud computing was the answer. I decided to create an e-classroom in which all notes and worksheets were uploaded to a free website, allowing students to access the documents whenever they wanted. There are more than 60 teachers in the secondary section in my school. If each teacher can save approximately 120,000 Indian rupees in a year, we will be able to save 7,200,000 Indian rupees (around $161,000 in U.S. dollars). Moreover, I have passed a valuable message about looking for solutions and optimizing resources on to my students, who will be entrepreneurs in the future.

—Bijal Damani, grade 11–12 business teacher, Galaxy Education System, Rajkot, India

Making 9th Grade a Priority

For me, it's not about doing more with less—it's about doing the right things and forgetting the resource-depleting initiatives that have not yielded results. Right now everybody understands that resources are limited. This may be the opportunity school leaders need to remove pet programs or initiatives that are not producing positive results for students.

For secondary school leaders, nationwide data indicate that the 9th grade deserves more resources. Especially for our at-risk populations, 9th grade may be our last, best chance to catch kids before they fall. How can we afford to not budget for extensive interventions, teaming possibilities, and social-emotional support for those students? Cutting programs is never easy, but in unfavorable economic times, leaders must make the appropriate, albeit difficult, decisions in how to allocate resources. At the high school level—show 9th grade the money.

—PJ Caposey, principal, Oregon High School, Oregon, Illinois

Pulling Together

Soon after I became superintendent, we prominently displayed a three-part survey, still in use today, on the district's website, which asks, What can we do to save money? What can we do to raise revenue? What will you do to help? We activated a citizens' financial task force to harvest and dissect ideas.

In two years, $26 million was cut from the budget. Our teachers voted to waive some supplemental wages to keep more people employed. A new ...

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