Fluctuating enrollment makes it hard to judge how many computers will be needed.
AUBURN – Some of the state’s middle schools do not have enough laptops. Other schools have too many.
Tony Sprague, director of the laptop program, said the state has been struggling for months to get the right number of laptops to schools because student enrollments constantly shift, making it difficult to predict how many portable computers a school will need.
“It’s kind of a rolling number,” Sprague said.
Last May, middle schools told the Maine Department of Education how many seventh-grade students they expected to enroll this fall. But over the summer, student enrollment dropped at some schools as families moved or sent their children to new schools. Enrollment jumped at other schools.
This fall, Sprague estimated that about half of the state’s 240 middle schools found themselves with too few – or too many – laptops.
Auburn Middle School was 20 short.
To ensure that no student missed out on class work, those without laptops have shared with classmates. So far, that remedy has worked.
“It’s a process. We’re getting there,” said Principal Kathi Cutler.
Because Auburn Middle School serves a city in which families constantly move in and out, Sprague said, its laptop shortage has been unusually high.
In most other schools, only one or two laptops were needed. School officials in Lewiston, Poland and Farmington said they didn’t need any additional computers.
Because the state cannot afford to keep a pool of laptops in reserve, officials have had to shift the computers from one school to another, taking laptops from schools that have extras. In Auburn, laptops have now started “trickling in,” Cutler said.
Since enrollments continue to change during the school year, the correction has been slow. It’s expected to continue throughout the year as enrollments change.
“We’ve had schools that have said they needed some, and then two days later students move out,” Sprague said.
Maine’s laptop program puts a portable computer in the hands of every seventh- and eighth-grade student in Maine. It started last year when 17,000 seventh-grade students and teachers got their own Apple iBooks to use in school. About 17,000 eighth-graders and teachers received computers this fall.
Comments are no longer available on this story