South Portland sixth-graders to get iPads

Everybody always wants the latest and greatest, and, this fall, South Portland sixth-graders will be at the front of the line.

At a recent special meeting, the school board voted 4-3 to buy 60 iPads as part of a $120,468 plan to extend one-on-one computing to Grade 6.

The iPads, Superintendent Suzanne Godin said, will be rotated among the four middle school “teams” each semester. The district’s technology team will assess results before making a recommendation on how to proceed when it comes time to renew leases under the state’s Maine Learning Technology Initiative program in 2014.

Students in grades 7-12 each have a personal laptop provided as part of the state technology program. However, the city has never had more than 100 laptops available for 268 sixth-graders.

School officials wanted to but enough computers for every Grade 6 student, but decided to test iPads as part of the buy. The reason, said Superintendent Suzanne Godin, is that the district’s MLTI contract will be up in two years.

“We don’t know what our needs are going to be two years from now. We just want to make informed choices along the may,” said Godin. “We wanted to pilot the iPads to see if they have the same functionality of the laptops, because they’re about half the cost.”

According to Godin, not only are iPads cheaper than the Macbook computers – $480 versus $928 – a broken screen costs half as much to fix.

There also is a belief that the touch-screen technology can be a good learning tool for younger and disabled students, Godin said.

Not everyone is in love with the idea however.

"I think they are toys, and they should be toys for adults," said Preble Street resident Pam Remy, just prior to the school board vote.

That, said Godin, has been a typical reaction.

“People have been ‘Oh my God’ about it, but, in reality, it’s just a chance for us to try it before we go whole-hog into one technology or the other,” she said.

Godin said sixth-graders cannot take their computers home, as older students are allowed to do. This, she said, gives staff a year to drill in concepts of responsible use and care.

The purchase was made possible thanks to recent energy conservation efforts. Under a $1.47 million bond, the district paid Siemens to research where the district could save on energy costs and to make the changes. Those efforts, including conversion from oil heat to natural gas at Memorial Middle School, netted enough to make the bond payment, as planned.

However, enough money was saved that, at year’s end, school officials had enough to expand the computing program to Grade 6.