Schools|As a result of the equipment procurement mess in the City of Helsinki, many schools have had to start the semester without any kind of presentation technology.
Helsinki the city is going through a strange mess in terms of equipment procurement.
It’s about screens ordered for schools, which were being acquired for five different schools in Helsinki. The value of the purchase is 315,000 euros.
As a result of the mess, for example, in the escape rooms of Kannelmäki elementary school and in the additional premises of Jätkäsaari elementary school, the school has been running for almost a month without any kind of presentation technology.
“It has not been possible to show the students any visual material and all lesson plans have had to be remade. It has caused a huge amount of extra work,” sums up the Kannelmäki primary school teacher.
The teacher does not want to appear in the story with his name, because he fears that it will harm his career.
Presentation technology are standard school equipment and, according to the teacher, the equipment is of central importance in modern education.
Usually, schools have either a monitor, a projector or a documentary camera that can be connected to the teacher’s computer, which can be used to project, for example, a page from a paper textbook onto a screen.
At the beginning of the fall semester, however, presentation technology was missing from the classrooms of Kannelmäki elementary school.
“Teaching my subject requires that I can show students materials from a computer. The class has, among other things, several students with an immigrant background, for whom visual aids are very important,” explains the teacher.
The situation has caused uncertainty among teachers.
At the school, the teachers have been told briefly that it is a failed competition. The teacher wonders how such an arrangement was allowed to happen.
“Ultimately, the students are the ones who suffer from the situation,” the teacher laments.
In addition to screens, material is also presented in schools by projecting it onto a screen with projectors or documentary cameras.
Helsinki the city acknowledges the mess.
The equipment procurement, which started in May, had to be stopped in August. Before that, in June, the board of education and training had processed the request for correction of the procurement decision and found it to be unwarranted.
Now the acquisition has been taken to the market court. The situation is exceptional.
“This is the only market law case in the four years I’ve been working here,” says the head of the education and training industry’s learning technology services
unit Seppo Perälä.
According to Perälä, the issue is that the technical characteristics of the devices did not meet the city’s conditions.
However, the city did not notice the technical deficiency of the equipment until a request for correction was made. Then it turned out that, in fact, only one of the eight participants in the competition met the requirements.
In technical the requirement is about the refresh rate of the screens, which the city requires in new devices to be 120 hertz (Hz).
The refresh rate means how many times per second the image is updated on the screen.
However, a small technical detail tells what the new technology is all about.
The company that won the competition claimed that the devices have a refresh frequency of 120 hertz, but the competing company that complained about the matter to the market court claims that the actual frequency is only 60 hertz.
In the brochure submitted to the city as an additional explanation, the frequency is claimed to be 120, but on the screen manufacturer’s website it is 60 hertz.
The information is essential, as the 60 hertz refresh rate represents outdated technology.
City assumes, according to Perälä, that the equipment suppliers provide correct information about the products they offer in the tender, but it is not the task of the procurement unit of the industry to check the information provided.
The city will tender the purchase again, because new screens are needed in the schools, says Perälä.
Before that, schools have to make do with the equipment they have or have to do without.
According to Perälä, the city’s procurement process usually takes “a few months, depending on the scope of the procurement.”
“I can’t say about the continuation schedule, because there are many parties involved and the Market Court also takes its own time,” says Perälä.
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