The Centers for Quality Teaching and Learning does not solicit or accept computer donations. However, when companies contact us with a worthwhile donation of computers available to a school, we use our Regional Facilitators and listservs to get the word out and try to identify a donor. From there, we put the donor and recipient in contact with each other to work out logistics.

If you are accepting a donation and need paperwork to meet donor or school requirements, here is a donation contract template. You may revise as needed, and do not need to send a copy to us.

We recommend that you do NOT place an estimated value on the donation; leave that to the donors and their accountants.

We also recommend that you make no promises about where or how the donated computers will be used, except that they will be used for educational purposes. That may mean they'll end up in a classroom somewhere, or it may just mean your students will use them for practice.

A couple of important notes on ethics and program integrity:

• NEVER rebuild or sell donated computers for personal gain.
• Some teachers have raffled refurbished donated computers to raise money for student organizations. Great idea, but check to make sure the donor doesn't object and get an administrator's okay as well.
• If the donor neglected to erase all personal data from the computer, make that your first step! If you don't already have a process for wiping hard drives clean, one popular choice is the free program Eraser (www.heidi.ie/eraser/), which can overwrite individual files as well as erase your whole hard drive. Another option is a program called Kill Disk (www.killdisk.com), which comes in both a free version and a professional version (about $30) which complies with the U.S. Department of Defense standard for overwriting data. (Of course, erasing the hard drive gets rid of the operating system as well as other software, so if possible, get the donor to provide the Windows and other software that came with the computer.)