Subject: [NEXTEL-1] New Oakland schools chief nixes free Nextel employee cell phones

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 10:48:38 -0400

Posted on Tue, Jul. 01, 2003

New Oakland schools chief nixes free Nextel employee cell phones
Associated Press

OAKLAND, Calif. - Any Oakland school district employees who
didn't like the way the new schools chief Randy Ward came in and
cut costs might have had trouble letting him know about it: he'd
turned off all of their freebie cell phones to save cash.

Ward, the state's administrator for the Oakland Unified School
District, hit the ground running and looked to trim the fat early with
the move that stopped service to 500 district employee cell
phones.

Chatty managers and principals were racking up $750,000 a year
in costs for the phones and Ward saw an opportunity for the
district to save money.

"The cell phone is a luxury, but everybody thought they needed
one," Ward said. "It grew into a monster."

Some of the monthly cell phone bills for individual phones were
between $200 and $300 per month, according to Harold Lowe,
director of purchasing for the district.

When Ward asked for a list of who had the 500 phones in their
possession, only 200 phones could be matched to individuals.

The cell phone crackdown, and the associated savings, comes after
the state bailed Oakland out with a $100 million emergency loan
last month and installed Ward to run the downtrodden district.

Former Superintendent Dennis Chaconas bought the cell phones to
keep in contact with project managers overseeing modernization
projects at various campuses in 2000, Lowe said.

But many of those managers kept the phones after the work was
done.

To make matters more expensive, Nextel's contract changed and
the district was soon forced to pay for every minute of talk time,
according to Lowe.

"Our monthly bills shot up. I remember one bill (for all phone lines)
last October was $119,000," he told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ward is now busy crafting a new cell phone policy in which only
certain people will qualify for phones, and they'll have to buy their
own. Additionally, they'll receive a monthly stipend of under $100
toward payment of their total bill for the phone.

http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/6209035.htm

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