An Outsourcing Debacle

Though the district can cancel the contract with just 30 days' notice, the article says, officials worry that they have no plan for providing copies. The in-plant can offer some assistance, but without on-site copiers and desktop printers, teacher's jobs would become much more difficult.

In the beginning, most at DISD just trusted Kinko's cost and savings estimates, without understanding how they were calculated. Now, however, their trust shattered, officials are cringing at the reality of the cost increases. For the 64 DISD schools under its contract, Kinko's billed $7.1 million in 2005, the article states; for the other 153 schools, copying expenses totaled about $5.7 million.