Slimmed-Down Laptop Program Coming to West Deptford High School

West Deptford’s one-to-one laptop initiative is heading to the , though budget cuts have changed the program’s scope, school district officials said Monday night.

Tom Tucci, the district’s technology director, laid out a revised plan for the 2012-13 school year, which includes leasing 1,500 laptops, instead of a planned 2,000, to outfit the entire high school, as well keeping the middle school on the one-to-one program using some leased computers and some that have only been in service for a year or two.

Instead of spending $270,000 on technology heading into next year, Tucci said he’s knocked down the budget to $120,000 by changing the scope, cutting some unnecessary equipment and shifting around the original three-year plan for the district.

“We’ve pushed it back almost two years,” he said.

It won’t be just students getting laptops, either, Tucci said. The roughly 70 teachers at the high school will get their own, after the district shifts around some laptops currently at the middle school.

And staying on that move toward more and more technology integration is key, said district curriculum supervisor Kristin O’Neil.

“Technology shouldn’t be an add-on,” O’Neil said, touting the idea of global learning—going beyond the classroom walls to delve deeper into subjects.

West Deptford High School principal Brian Gismondi, who was principal at the middle school during the shift to the one-to-one laptop program there, said he expects the transition to be a bit rocky at the high school, given it’s a huge shift all at once.

“We’re changing everything we do at the high school,” he said.

But given the use of technology already going on at that level, from a freshman blog to the student council’s online suggestion box to a staff blog, Gismondi said teachers’ concerns are more to the logistics side—what happens if something breaks or the wireless connection goes down—than anything else.

“They’re not worried about implementation,” he said.

The move to laptops at the high school comes at a good time, O’Neil said, given the statewide move to new standardized tests in about two years—standardized tests that will, for the most part, be done with computers, rather than pencil and paper.

Beyond the high school and middle school, the district still has a stock of older laptops that, while not useful for the one-to-one program, can be shifted to the elementary schools to increase computer access there, Tucci said.

The elementary schools will also get a slew of new desktop computers to help upgrade what Tucci said is a badly aging technology infrastructure.

“The elementary libraries are terrible,” he said.

A long-term plan for moving more technology into the lower grades is still a bit fuzzy, though.

“K-to-four is going to look different,” Tucci said. That may mean tablet computers or iPads instead of laptops, but he said a decision on that hasn’t been made yet.