- May 5, 2024
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Back-to-school shopping lists may include fewer pencils and notebooks this year if the Flagler County School Board moves forward with a plan to give laptops to all high school students when classes resume.
If the plan is approved, about 3,800 laptops will be issued to students starting the first week of school. By the end of October, all high school students would have their own laptops for use both at school and at home.
The district would then redistribute its iPad tablets to children in fifth through seventh grade. Younger students would have access to technology carts that would circulate throughout the classrooms.
Rather than purchasing the laptops outright at $800 each, the school district would enter a four-year lease agreement with Apple to pay for the technology over that time. The cost for the first year would be around $770,000, to be paid out of revenue from the district’s half-penny sales tax. (Revenues from this tax can only be used to purchase technology, to build or maintain school buildings or to acquire land.)
The Flagler County School District has long planned to distribute technology to students, with the goal of having one device per every student in the district. The original plan was to purchase iPad tablets and integrate them into the classroom.
But on Wednesday, during a day-long strategic planning session, the district’s technology staff told school staff, teachers and officials that rolling out laptops instead would be more conducive to the district’s technological evolution.
“Sticking with the MacBook Air for now is better because that’s what teachers are used to now,” said Janet Valentine, the school district’s superintendent. “Teachers aren’t going to use something they’re not comfortable with.”
The district currently offers technology training for teachers and plans to strengthen that program in the future. But inundating teachers with new technology results in an equity issue for students, Valentine said: Some teachers, who are accustomed to the technology, embrace the devices for classroom enhancement, while others stick with more traditional models.
Another difficulty that has arisen with iPads, which the district has been purchasing for the last couple of years, is that the district is having a hard time keeping up with the technology as it evolves. An iPad 4 model was released in late 2012; currently, rumors are circulating online about a release date for the iPad 5.
“The device is really maturing with the release of iOS 7,” said Justin Brush, a senior technology consultant for the district, who presented the MacBook Air proposal along with Sue Nocella, a curriculum specialist; and Maria McGovern, a technology coordinator.
Brush said the tablets will likely be the right choice in the future, but he said it's inefficient to train and retrain teachers and to purchase technology that quickly becomes outdated.
“It’s really stopping us from moving forward right now, because we can’t get the training at the pace we need it,” Valentine said.
School Board members were among attendees at Wednesday’s planning session, and the conversation about how to integrate technology into classrooms quickly morphed into one about the program’s cost.
Technology staff originally planned to bring the proposed leasing contract before the School Board for a vote at the end of the month, but board members asked that the matter be discussed more thoroughly in a workshop, which will be held at 5 p.m. July 16.
