COMPUTER HARDWARE DONATED TO DISTRICTS.

Byline: Sylvia Oliande Daily News Staff Writer

School districts throughout the county will benefit from donations of computer hardware funneled their way this week, including a gift of machines refurbished by inmates at the Todd Road Jail facility.

The Ventura County Sheriff's Department gave 90 computers to the Ventura Unified and Moorpark Unified school districts, and in a separate move, Camarillo-based Imation gave county schools 500 disk drives to be used in their classrooms.

Capt. Keith Parks, a spokesman for the Sheriff's Department, said the computers were given to schools in part because the program is in partnership with the Detwiler Foundation, which has worked to put computers in classrooms.

But schools also are beneficiaries because they often have the greatest need for computers but the least amount of resources to get them.

``They're going to the schools because typically schools don't have a lot of budget where they can go out and buy computers for their classrooms,'' he said. ``And when they do, it's usually just one per class, so students are not always going to have a lot of opportunity to use them. By putting another one in the classroom, you create a lot more opportunity.''

The donation was the result of months of work by the inmates of the jail who are enrolled in a vocational class designed to teach them to refurbish computers.

The computers themselves were surplus machines Ventura County offices had replaced because they did not work. Using several computers for parts, the inmates were able to get them in working condition, though the recipients will be responsible for upgrading them to accommodate newer software.

The department's first donation was to the Fillmore School District, which received 10 computers given to the vocational program by the Unocal Corp.

Prior to the establishment of the computer course, the county usually sold old computers for scrap to outside vendors.

Also this week, Imation, a division of 3M Corp., delivered state-of-the-art disk drives to be used in county schools.

The drives use a disk similar to a standard floppy but can hold up to 120 megabytes of data compared to about 1.44 megabytes on a standard disk, and they operate up to five times faster.

School officials said students can use the drives to download files off the Internet and store large files and teachers can transport data between classrooms.

Educators said donations like these are a boon for schools that are trying to keep up with a rapidly changing high-tech industry.

``This is a windfall for the school districts,'' said Stan Mantooth, assistant superintendent of business and personnel services for the county schools. ``If (Imation) were to sell these, this would probably amount to a $50,000 donation. Normally we'll get computers donated that probably accumulates to a lot of dollars, but all in one pop like this to get this much equipment is great.''