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AUGUSTA — Governor
John Baldacci wants school districts to go ahead
and rent their own laptops for this year’s
incoming freshmen on the promise he will work to
get the Legislature to approve the funding when
the bills come due in the next fiscal year.
A plan issued last
month by the state Department of Education said
the Governor has told Education Commissioner Susan
Gendron to “leave no stone unturned” to expand the
state’s middle school laptop program into the high
school, recognizing the state has no money for it
this fiscal year.
Last month,
Gendron tried to convince enough of the state’s
superintendents of schools to agree to rent them
on their own to secure a group rate from Apple
Computer. The state also is inviting school
districts to apply to the state’s revolving school
renovation fund to install wireless networks in
participating high schools.
Superintendents
have generally supported the program, but
teachers, according to their union, the Maine
Education Association, are evenly divided.
Education Deputy
Commissioner Patrick Phillips said school
districts would be taking a “certain amount of
risk” for footing the rental bill if the
Legislature does not come up with the money a year
from now, in fiscal 2006.
“The Governor is
pretty convinced that he could make it happen with
the Legislature next year,” Phillips said.
Some area school
districts say they would assume the risk, but many
don’t want to move ahead without state help.
MSAD 28
(Camden-Rockport) Superintendent Pat Hopkins said
the district had purchased laptops for high school
teachers this past year in anticipation of the
state providing them to incoming freshmen. But the
notion of paying for their own computers for
students, at an estimated $290,000 a year “is just
too much,” she said.
Her district is
one that receives no substantial aid from the
state as it is, and with “Palesky looming,” she
said she couldn’t ask her board for that much
money. Now, she said, the eighth-graders will have
to go “from laptops to nothing.”
In Ellsworth,
laptops are not in the school budget for this
coming year. “We won’t do it on our own,” said
Carl Stecher, the system’s technology coordinator.
In Bar Harbor, the Mount Desert Island Educational Enhancement Fund offered to buy
laptops for the freshmen and all the high school
teachers — a plan that has been in the works since
it looked like the state wasn’t going to come up
with the money. The cost would be around $200,000
a year.
The school is
dealing directly with Apple, said Principal Robert
Liebow, who recently presented the plan to the
school board. The board okayed the proposal to
bring laptops to the high school.
The MDI
Educational Enhancement Fund, a private group,
will raise money for the total cost of the
project, or about $200,000. Technical preparations
for the laptops will be done during the fall, and
the plan is to have laptops for high school
students starting second semester.
Meanwhile,
Boothbay Superintendent Eileen King said her
district has $30,000 to spend on laptops next
school year, and the money will be used to buy
computers for high school teachers, putting some
on carts for students, or targeting
science-related courses with laptops for students
and teachers. “It will be some combination of
those plans,” she said. “It will not be
one-on-one” for students.
As for the state
abandoning plans for this year to provide the
computers, “We’re very, very disappointed they
brought us along this far and are leaving many
districts” without the means to expand the
program, she said.
The rate the state
hopes to get for individual districts for the
rental agreement is $300 a year per computer, paid
for four years — the current lease/purchase
arrangement the state has with Apple for all
middle school kids.
Baldacci had
wanted to expand that program this September,
leasing computers for all the state’s 16,000
incoming freshmen and 6,000 high school teachers.
Because there is no money left in the laptop fund
started by former Governor Angus King, the state
had proposed a 55-45 percent split on the cost
between the Department of Education and local
school districts. Like the rental deal, the lease
bill, too, wouldn’t have come due until fiscal
year 2006.
The Legislature
did not approve the expansion before it adjourned,
leaving the Department of Education scrambling to
find a way to keep the laptop expansion alive.
While the
professional association representing the state’s
superintendents has supported the laptop
initiative, the Maine Education Association has
been ambivalent.
“We didn’t take a
position on laptops. The membership is split,”
said MEA Executive Director Mark Gray in an interview about the program last
month. “Some are very supportive, particularly
middle school teachers. The other half believe
that our schools have so many needs, the money can
be spent better elsewhere.”
As for renting the
equipment, Gray said the education association is
opposed to that option because “the rent will come
due at some point.”
Phillips said,
“balanced against the risk” of individual school
districts being stuck with the rental bill is the
educational benefit. “There’s a lot of districts
out there who want to do this.” |
