Lap of Luxury
School laptop programs raise issues of equity
By Lawrence Hardy
 Melissa
McFeely saw the change about six weeks after the laptops were
passed out. One of her sixth-graders, Pendarvis Byson, had been
having trouble with grammar and penmanship. Now this "very bright
child who is very behind in his skills" was narrating his own
PowerPoint presentation on atoms and molecules.
Pendarvis' mother, Gloria Young, is a laundry manager who works
on Hilton Head Island, S.C., an hour's boat ride from her rural
home. She could not afford a laptop computer without the leasing
subsidy that the Beaufort County Schools offer parents of children
on free and reduced-price lunch. She says the Laptop Notebook
Program at Robert Smalls Middle School, for which she pays $10
a month, is boosting her 12-year-old's self-confidence and sparking
his interest in learning.
Obie Schramm's son, Christopher, won't be getting a laptop.
The Schramms live on Hilton Head, home to some of the wealthiest
families in South Carolina, but they aren't rich. Schramm's husband
owns a contracting company, and she stays home with their four
kids. They don't qualify for a district subsidy and would have
to buy the computer outright.
When Schramm told Christopher they couldn't afford a laptop
for him next year, the fifth-grader "went ballistic," she recalls.
He couldn't understand why he couldn't have the same high-tech
tool as some of his classmates.
"I've got four kids," Schramm says. "And $2,000 for one of them
is a lot of baseball cleats and ballet slippers for the others."
The program, she adds, has "created a group of middle-class
haves and have-nots."
Fair or unfair?
Beaufort's program attracted national publicity when some of
these middle-class parents complained that the subsidy system
was unfair. More than 50 parents signed a petition last fall,
which they presented at a school board meeting.
The disagreement illustrates the equity issues facing school
boards across the country as they try to include technology in
their schools. Few schools can afford, either logistically or
financially, to equip every student or every classroom with the
latest technology. It is an ongoing process and an expensive one.
How do you decide who gets into a new laptop program, for example,
or which children should be subsidized?
"I think [the laptop] is a wonderful tool," says Kenneth Stevenson,
an education professor at the University of South Carolina who
is evaluating the educational benefits of Beaufort's laptop program.
"But it's an expensive tool that some students just simply can't
afford."
Beaufort was one of the pilot districts for Anytime
Anywhere Learning, a program sponsored by Microsoft and Toshiba.
More than 60,000 students and teachers participate in the laptop
program nationwide in 500 public and private schools. (See "Laptops
boost learning, study says," January 1998 Electronic School.)
Now in its third year, Beaufort's program serves 1,700 students
in grades six, seven, and eight, says Jane Jude, president of
the Beaufort County Schoolbook Foundation, a volunteer group that
raises funds for the program. The group has received about $200,000
in contributions from businesses, foundations, and individuals,
as well as a $1 million federal grant.
From the beginning, Superintendent Herman Gaither was concerned
about two issues: how to get computers into the homes of children
on free and reduced-price lunch, and how to make the laptop program
nondiscriminatory. A sprawling district of 15,500 students, Beaufort
includes the very rich of Hilton Head and the rural poor who lack
books and technology. Less than 2 percent of the free and reduced-price
lunch children have computers at home, Gaither says.
The laptop program is about "having access to information beyond
the school day," Gaither says. "It has always been there for a
segment of our students, and always not been there for
another segment of our students."
The district started the program in 1996 with 300 sixth-graders,
planning to add another 300 six-graders each year. The laptops
were leased for $60 a month, and the cost was passed on to all
parents except those whose children qualify for free and reduced-price
lunch. This group was charged between $10 and $25 a month.
The program now has 1,700 students, more than half of whom receive
subsidies. But it has become more expensive than expected, partially
because of a more than 20 percent default rate on payments, Jude
says.
"We've had some collection challenges," she says, adding that
the defaults have been distributed proportionately among the various
income levels.
Last fall, the district required new participants not on free
and reduced-price lunch to buy their laptops at a cost of about
$2,000 apiece. And it made arrangements with banks to offer parents
home equity loans.
"You mean mortgage my home?" asked Susan Jancourtz, a school
board member, recalling the responses of some parents. "They went
absolutely bonkers."
Jancourtz is critical of the program, which she says will get
even more expensive in the future. "What $2,000 toy could I buy
these children tomorrow that would interest them in school?" she
asks. "I don't think a laptop would be the number one choice.
It could be a good after-school music program."
Board member Richard Caporale supports the program. He says
the district has achieved "a reasonable level of equity. But an
ideal level of equity? Absolutely, positively not."
Gaither says most parents who object to the program already
have computers in their homes. The district does not recommend
that these parents enroll their children in the laptop program.
Equity is achieved in school, he adds, because laptop students
are spread throughout classrooms and readily share their machines.
"We've never had a machine stolen. We've never had a machine
vandalized," he says. "We've never had a fight over [students
saying], 'You have one, I don't have one.'"
Pride of ownership
Superintendents at other Anytime Anywhere Learning sites also
report low vandalism and loss rates. Ninety-six percent of the
students in New York City's Community School District Six receive
federal lunch subsidies. But the district, which includes parts
of Harlem and other areas on the Upper West Side, has lost only
about eight laptops from a program than numbers 2,700 students
in grades four through seven, says Superintendent Anthony Amato.
He says parents have created a safety committee, which set up
foot patrols to walk students between home and school.
Amato doesn't face an equity issue along income lines, but there
are laptop haves and have-nots in his district too. He says he
lets teachers decide whether they want to be in the program, preferring
to have interest "bubble up from the ranks." Students learn at
the end of the previous school year or over the summer whether
their teachers will be in the program.
"It's a totally random process [for students]," Amato says,
though he adds that parents who appeal to principals may be able
to have their children included in the program.
The district pays half the cost of the laptops, and families
pay the other half -- $34 a month for three years. At the end
of that period, families pay another $1 to own the machines.
Textbooks get destroyed, their covers marked and their pages
torn, Amato says. It is different with the laptops. "The psychology
of ownership is incredibly powerful," he says.
Ownership isn't an issue for Joanne Guild, technology coordinator
for the 1,300-student Cuba-Rushford School District near Buffalo,
N.Y. Like Gaither, Guild wanted to put technology in the hands
of students who didn't have home computers, but the district didn't
have the money to provide them with laptops. Instead, it opened
a laptop lab with 70 computers. Any of the 600 students in the
sixth- through 12th-grade building can sign out a computer provided
a parent or guardian has taken a two-hour training course
Disadvantaged students "don't feel separate from the group because
everyone's able to stop and get a laptop -- a teacher, a student,
a poor student, or a wealthy student," Guild says.
When she started the program four years ago, people laughed
and said "You'll never have a laptop left," Guild recalls. But
"the only case [of damage] we've had is where a cat sharpened
its claws on it. But that can happen anywhere."
Struggling toward equity
If the Clovis Unified School District tried to provide a laptop
for each of its seventh- through 12th-grade students, it would
cost $34 million, says Chuck Philips, director of instructional
technology for the 32,000-student district in Fresno, Calif. The
district can't afford that, so it has set up two separate computer
programs for students in grades seven through nine. The standard
program ensures that there are five to six laptops for each classroom.
An immersion program includes 1,000 students whose parents bought
them laptops, plus about 100 students assigned to machines purchased
by the district. These students are chosen from a pool selected
by need and placed in a lottery.
Is it fair that wealthier students get in the program automatically,
whereas less fortunate students must compete for spots? "It would
be if I walked into an immersion class and that's where all my
rich kids are," Philips says, but that isn't the case. "I think
there definitely would be a problem if we didn't have the standard
program."
Clovis' Sierra Intermediate School has 189 students in its immersion
program, says Principal Gabe Escalera. Sixty students who did
not have laptops applied at the beginning of the year, competing
for 20 slots. Of these, 40 students were deemed to need financial
assistance, based on family income, expenses, and the number of
children in their families. They were put into a lottery for the
20 slots.
Escalera concedes the system is imperfect. He notes, for example,
that poor Hmong children from Southeast Asia, who make up 11 percent
of the school population, are underrepresented in the immersion
program. But he says the administration is trying to get more
laptops. Recently, it decided to buy 15 laptops for in-class use
by 148 students in classes for English as a second language, among
the district's more disadvantaged students. "Do you stop the program
because it's not equitable, or do you struggle and try to get
as many people into it as possible?" he asks.
The answer, for districts like Clovis and Beaufort, is to keep
struggling.
"It's better to serve some well, than to not do it at all,"
says Jude, the president of Beaufort's volunteer foundation.
"When I get discouraged," Jude adds, "I stop by the schools
and see what some of these kids are doing."
If she had stopped by Roberts Smalls Middle School a few months
ago, she would have seen Pendarvis Byson, the 12-year-old who
had trouble with his cursive writing and grammar, narrating a
guest PowerPoint presentation on erosion for the sixth- and seventh-graders
in Melissa McFeely's class.
"It helps you get ready for the future," he says, "and does
things that paper and pencil can't do."
Meanwhile, Obie Schramm is buying the Encarta encyclopedia program
for her family's home computer, but a laptop is beyond her reach.
She supports Superintendent Gaither on most issues and says it's
hard to go against the district on this one.
"I think that his intent was admirable beyond words," Schramm
says. "[But] in public education, I think you have to give everyone
equal opportunity."
Lawrence Hardy
is an associate editor of Electronic School and The American School
Board Journal.
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