Pittsburgh Public Schools officials have shut down a program to distribute thousands of free computers that were refurbished at taxpayer expense for city school children, after some of the computers ended up in a Squirrel Hill shop that the FBI is investigating for selling stolen property.

	Lake Fong, Post-Gazette About 5,000 refurbished computers are stored in the former Gladstone Middle School in Hazelwood. Fifty similar computers that belong to Pittsburgh Public Schools ended up at A1 PC Computer in Squirrel Hill and were being sold on eBay. Click photo for larger image.

"If some got into the wrong hands, we don't want to repeat that situation," said Richard Fellers, the school district's chief of operations.

Federal officials are looking into what one investigator called the "mess" in the school district's inventory and accounting procedures for about 8,000 outdated computers to determine how about 50 of those computers, which the district has no record of donating, ended up for sale on eBay by A-1 PC Computer on Murray Avenue. Federal and city school officials also were investigating whether other computers are missing from the district, what computers the district donated and why no one in the district knew they were missing until federal investigators told them so. School officials declined to release a list of recipients because that list is part of the federal investigation.

A man who answered the telephone at the computer shop declined to comment for this story.

The 8,000 or so Dell computers, most of which are five to seven years old, had been used in classrooms and administrative offices until they were replaced with leased computers last summer, according to Fellers. The computers were refurbished to cleanse their hard drives of all student data and to improve their capabilities so they could be donated to Pittsburgh Public Schools students and community groups under a program called Emerging Links. The program was designed to give Internet access to students who otherwise could not connect to the Internet outside of school.

But after the district officials spent about $500,000 -- or about $72 a machine -- on overhauling the computers, they discovered they couldn't afford to carry out their plan of subsidizing Internet access for the families and groups who received the computers, Fellers said. About 2,000 of the computers were not worth refurbishing and were scrapped, he said.

Rather than try to sell the remaining computers, he said, the district decided to give them to any qualified Pittsburgh community group or parent who applied for one in writing. Parents did not have to be poor to receive a computer, and they were not limited to one machine; if they had two children, they could receive two computers, Fellers said. They and the community groups only were required to live in the city.

Parents, however, were not required to produce their children's birth certificates or other identification to prove their paternity and their residence, he said. Most community groups did not have to prove they operated within the city, either, he said.

And while the district kept a list of the serial numbers of the 2,200 computers it donated -- sometimes in batches of 100 to 200, for large organizations -- there is no inventory list of serial numbers for the remaining computers that still are being stored at the former Gladstone Middle School in Hazelwood. School officials say they don't know exactly how many computers are stored at the school.

The computers weren't more carefully accounted for because they were believed to have almost no value, Fellers said.

"In our minds, we were pretty much giving away garbage," Fellers said. "We were more concerned with getting every one placed that we could."

But even though the computers were going to be given away, school officials should have accounted for them more carefully, according to school board member Jean Fink.

"Maybe it would have been overkill, but it still would have been nice to have some kind of assurance they were going to city taxpayers," Fink said. "They probably should have looked at your driver's license, for goodness sake."