A new Colorado charter school that opened this fall has saved thousands of dollars in technology costs by getting expert volunteers to do the work, shopping for computer equipment at auctions, and using free Linux software in a thin-client environment.

The small school's innovative and cost-cutting measures have enabled it to leverage a $77,000 state technology grant to acquire more than $350,000 worth of infrastructure, putting in place more than 100 computers for a school of 435 students and doing it all in less than 90 days, said Kirk R. Rheinlander, a parent volunteer and head of the technology committee for Ridgeview Classical School.

Instead of hiring and paying high salaries for technology staff, the charter school—part of the Poudre Valley School District in Ft. Collins—enlisted parent and community volunteers to form a committee to plan, organize, and implement the school's technology.

Located in a technology-rich area of Colorado, the school rounded up 15 volunteers—half of whom were parents with technology backgrounds. It also recruited some members of a local Linux hobby group.

"My consulting rate is many, many times more than [what] the school district is [able] to pay someone to do this work," said Rheinlander, who works as a technology consultant.

"We were basically given the technology budget—which was a state technology grant—to get us off the ground," Rheinlander said. The committee spent the majority of the money on a high-speed network, large-scale infrastructure, and computer hardware, as the grant rules did not allow software.

The technology committee was able to extend the reach of its $77,000 grant by buying equipment from auctions and liquidation sales.

"We bought a lot of equipment, but we bought it cheap," Rheinlander said. "For example, we bought an IBM Netfinity server for just over $1,000." The server usually costs about $20,000, he said.

"We bought a collapsed-backbone, gigabit fiber-optic switch for $2,900," Rheinlander added. "It was nice that all these dot-coms chose to go out of business when we needed to buy stuff for the school."

Usually when a school makes a purchase, it needs to go through a bidding process. However, Rheinlander said the technology committee could take advantage of low-priced, practically new equipment because Ridgeview Classical School is a charter school, and the grant did not require a bidding process.

"It's something any school district could do if they were willing to rewrite the rules," he said.

Instead of installing full-fledged desktop computers throughout the school, the committee opted to use thin-client technology, in which all data and software resides on a server and is accessed by "terminal" computer stations.

The school received 100 donated computers and stripped them of memory, disk drives, and other components to reduce the amount of maintenance the machines would require.