Administrators identified the lack of funding as a significant barrier to not only bringing CS courses to their schools, but also to maintaining the quality of materials needed to teach those courses. They cited this as a challenge for many courses at their schools, but also indicated that CS requires more costly resources than other courses. One challenge is providing the necessary computer maintenance: “Whatever computer science courses you add, whether it's a one-to-one or there's a computer lab, you need that set of folks down the hall ready to assist.” Schools are receiving financial support to expand computer science infrastructure, but this might not always be enough, as one administrator explained:
There's a headline in the newspaper… and it talks about how the school system is going to spend a million dollars on technology. That's not going to go very far. I mean it's great, but it's going to be like a drop in the ocean, compared with how many schools they have… I could easily spend a million dollars today, and we're an individual school.
In some cases, financial barriers impact students’ home lives in ways that pertain to CS. Students’ home contexts can sometimes limit their experience and exposure to technology in particular compared to other academic areas, due to the expense of maintaining technology in students’ homes. This may ultimately factor into the level of CS knowledge that students bring with them to school:
One thing that I have learned here, is that we have quite an affluent community, but when one of the parents loses their job, and they have to cut something, one of the first things they cut is technology. They cut that Internet… and so we have to try to provide those pieces for those students, which… we try to do. Well, if that happens and that child is like in the sixth grade, and the student goes through the sixth, seventh, eighth grade, and the school couldn't necessarily provide those supports, and then they get to high school, they are a little further behind. And so I think that's a component that we need to think about.
Student interest can also influence the allocation of resources, and if students are not enrolling in CS courses, this may result in fewer CS course offerings, as one administrator explains:
I’m worried that we would not be able to generate a critical mass of students necessary to justify investment in the program. So I know that we have about ten students that are available at this point, and given the resource limitations we've had—in our school district we've cut about a hundred million dollars out of our budget, over the last four years. It seems like every year we turn around and the state legislature is asking us to cut another 20 million, 12 million, so we end up looking at how many students would potentially be interested in the course, and can we offer a staff member to teach it, and right now, I’m not confident that we'll be able to do that.