2009 Lease Renewal Intrapreneurial Venture Pitch ~ Executive Summary

The Wireless Writing Program is an innovative program that has introduced Apple laptops into the hands of our grade 6 and 7 students in town and our grade 6-8 students at our rural sites. The WWP also supports carts of laptops in the two junior high schools.

The WWP has led to tremendous opportunities and change for our learning communities. We are approaching two major lease renewals in 2009 and 2010. Technology Services staff are working hard to make sure this project that has led to such great gains for our learning community is here to stay.

For more information and reports on the WWP please see our About the WWP page.

The vision of the Wireless Writing Project is one where student are continually increasing their abilities in writing as well as utilizing the technology to excel in all areas and truly learn anytime, anywhere.

The focus of the pitch is for the 2009 Lease Renewal and the benefits that will result.

The audience of the pitch is all learning community members but specifically the Trustees of the Board of Education who will approve the continuation of the line item in the 2009-2010 budget. Effectively the Trustees are the “buyer”. The trustees currently are composed of 5 long standing trustees that are very familiar with the project and two new trustees that will be sworn in early in December 2008.

The yearly lease cost will be approximately 184,000 dollars depending on product costs and interest rates in June of 2009.

The program is in the fourth year of full implementation and it has been nine years since the conception planning phase. The purpose of this pitch is to continue the program and benefit multiple other areas of the school district. The WWP has been successfully integrated into schools, classrooms, and the curriculum. The WWP supports all forms of learning and enhances other aspects of the school community.

Our target market is our grade 6-8 learning community members including schools, teachers, students and their families.

The lease renewal will lead to an enhancement and maintenance of Infrastructure that will support the delivery of content and services to our students.

2009 Lease Renewal Intrapreneurial Venture Pitch

The 2009 lease renewal pitch is 12 minutes long and available in three sizes of iTunes formatted (m4v) video as well as one Quicktime formatted 640×480 video (mov) below. All will take some time to fully download but the Quicktime movie file can be viewed while downloading. The m4v files must be fully downloaded before viewing.

WWP Pitch Large (m4v 81.8MB)

WWP Pitch Medium (m4v 58.5MB)

WWP Pitch Mobile (m4v 45.3MB)

WWP Pitch Movie (mov 87.4MB ~ streaming)

2009 Lease Proposal ~ Strengths and Weaknesses

The WWP Pitch video outlines the strengths of the program as well as identifies numerous opportunities and some challenges that will result in the lease renew.

While not a weakness of the proposal specifically, the financial office of School District 60 has identified that while we are currently in a surplus, our spending patterns may lead us towards a deficit in future years if we are not cautious. The WWP has had long term funding in the current form of two four year leases, offset by one year. The WWP has been a line item for multiple years and has been strongly supported throughout its life by staff, teachers, parents, students, and trustees.

Also as the district works towards reconfiguring grade levels from K-7, 8-10, and 10-12 to K-6, 7-9 Middle Schools, and a single 10-12 high school funding considerations must be taken into account. Existing programs will be closely scrutinized for cost savings. This situational weakness has been address in the proposal as a spin off of the proposed lease renewal will benefit the high school in terms of space and a significant cost savings in regards to adding two new mobile computer labs rather than a new stationary computer room.