Four technology-specific initiatives totaling $134 million are among the many education programs still at risk as House and Senate lawmakers try to resolve their differences over 2004 spending.

Three of these four programs were preserved in the Senate's version of the education spending bill but were cut in the House version, which more closely follows President Bush's 2004 budget request.

The fourth program, Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3)--a $62.5 million effort that promotes partnerships between colleges of education and K-12 schools to help new teachers integrate technology into their instruction--appears in neither the House nor the Senate appropriations bills.

Losing PT3 would deal a blow to schools across the country, many of which have struggled to recruit high-quality teachers who come to the classroom prepared to integrate technology into the curriculum, said Don Knezek, chief executive officer of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

The Bush administration says PT3 is unnecessary because the federal Improving Teacher Quality program already provides nearly $3 billion to support teacher preparation and professional development initiatives.

But Knezek, who served as director of ISTE's National Center for Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology before being named chief executive of ISTE, said he wasn't concerned so much about the loss of the funding itself as he was about the loss of ideals that mostly likely would result from the absence of federal leadership on this topic.

"K-12 education is a system," he said. "We need to take a systematic approach, and that includes recruiting highly qualified teachers who know how to use technology."

Still, ed-tech lobbyists have not given up on the program entirely. In September, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) circulated an Action Alert to its members hoping to drum up enough support to revive PT3 during the negotiations process.

It isn't just PT3 that is in trouble. Keith Krueger, executive director of CoSN, said the situation is indicative of funding shortages across the board.

"Overall funding levels [for school technology] are not growing," Krueger said. "For the most part, [Congress is] not even funding these programs up to their authorization levels."

At a time when nearly every state and district faces budget cuts of historic proportions, now is not the time for the federal government to shrink from its commitment to educational technology, he said.

Of the two overall education spending bills in negotiation at press time, the Senate's version is the more supportive of technology. Passed by the Senate in September, it would provide funding at current-year, or slightly lower, levels for a number of programs the House and the Bush administration would prefer to cut.

For instance, the Senate bill preserves the Community Technology Centers program, an initiative to help build computer centers in low-income areas, at $20 million in 2004. Although that's more than a third less than the $32 million the program received in 2003, it's still better than the preference in the House, where lawmakers voted to cut the program.