In a slap at California governor Pete Wilson, Democratic legislators have gutted funding for one of his favorite private-sector programs: a project that trains prison inmates in computer repair and places thousands of refurbished computers in public schools.
The proposed US$6 million cutback has set off a spate of Sacramento-style name-calling - charges of nepotism from the Democrats, and accusations from the governor's office that the fate of a lauded education program has been unduly politicized.
"This is a political drill to kill off, amend, or abort the governor's priority budget projects in the hopes of softening him down the line," said Sean Walsh, Wilson's deputy chief of staff. "The Democrats think they can horse trade it away at a later juncture."
The Computer Refurbishment Fund, the program that lost more than half its funding last week, is not in fact the one Democrats say they are concerned about. Rather, they say they're concerned about a related project, a nonprofit agency called the Detwiler Foundation that distributes some of the refurbished computers to schools.
Some consider the 6-year-old agency a model for national efforts to get technology into classrooms. The foundation's advocates credit it with helping raise California's ranking from 50th to 45th among US states in the number of computers per student in classrooms.
Founder John Detwiler contends that in the past five years, the foundation has helped place at least 30,000 computers in California schools, both public and private. That includes 16,700 he said the foundation distributed last year.
Some of those machines were rebuilt or upgraded by the California Computer refurbishing fund, which trains California Youth Authority inmates in computer repair. The inmates get computers collected by Detwiler and several other nonprofit agencies, fix them, and send them back to the nonprofits to be distributed in the schools.
Roughly $6 million of the $10 million refurbishing fund budget in the last fiscal year was spent to upgrade or fix computers distributed by Detwiler.
In recent days, several former employees of the Detwiler Foundation have gone on record as saying that the agency has inflated its distribution. One former staffer also criticized the quality of the computers Detwiler distributes.
Assemblyman Jack Scott, chairman of the Assembly Budget Subcommittee for Education, said he is also concerned that Detwiler earns $115,000 in salary from the foundation, and that his daughter, Diana Detwiler, is the foundation's executive director.
"We just had some concerns about some of the question marks. And some of the people had complained about the quality of the computers they received," Scott said.
Scott said concerns about the foundation led his panel to redirect $6 million away from the refurbishing fund. He said he isn't clear on details of the fund, and that it will be the subject of further discussion this week. "Given all the details of the budget, I'm not minutely qualified to discuss all this," Scott said.
Diana Detwiler said the foundation can account for each of the 30,000 computers it says it has handed out and will vouch for the machines' quality. As to concerns about her father's salary, Detwiler said the agency's $600,000 operating budget comes entirely from private grants and not from government funding.
"He's putting thousands of computers into the schools. The man is entitled to get some compensation for his work," said Walsh, Wilson's spokesman, calling "shameful" the criticism that Diana Detwiler should not be the foundation's executive director. "How can it be nepotism? The family founded this foundation together."
Diana Detwiler said her family's foundation will continue to hand out computers even if no money goes into the state fund. But she said the quality of machines would fall.
"The refurbishing money is wonderful, because it enables us to build state-of-the-art computers," she said. "The program will still be successful, but we will have to cannibalize parts from other machines."
Donavon Merck, manager of the Education Technology Office for the California Department of Education, said it is essential for the Legislature to find money for the refurbishing fund.
"I don't know if it has to be funded at the full $10 million.... But you just can't throw this away," he said.
