MA High School Forces All Students To Buy MacBooks

An anonymous reader sends in this excerpt from the Salem News: "A new program at Beverly High will equip every student with a new laptop computer to prepare kids for a high-tech future. But there's a catch. The money for the $900 Apple MacBooks will come out of parents' pockets. 'You're kidding me,' parent Jenn Parisella said when she found out she'd have to buy her sophomore daughter, Sky, a new computer. 'She has a laptop. Why would I buy her another laptop?' Sky has a Dell. Come September 2011, every student will need an Apple. They'll bring it to class and use it for homework. Superintendent James Hayes sees the technology as an essential move to prepare kids for the future. The School Committee approved the move last year, and Hayes said he's getting the news out now so families can prepare. 'We have one platform,' Hayes said. 'And that's going to be the Mac.'"

Comments

Don't let reality get in the way of your anger

[raddan]

Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said.

Which essentially means that the program is voluntary. The school is hoping to be able to save money by not having to provide computer labs.

Re:Don't let reality get in the way of your anger

[SpaceCadetTrav]

They did this in Fullerton, CA. There is a story and a video clip here: http://www.fullertonsfuture.org/2009/fullerton-school-laptop-program/ If you didn't pay $1,500 for an Apple laptop, your kid would get shipped off to another school on the other side of town. The ACLU got involved, but settled for a weak compromise - if you submit your personal financial information to the school district, they may decide that you can get public assistance. Otherwise, you are forced to pay for the laptop.

Before anyone gets in a huff...

[Jorkapp]

FTFA:

"Parents can pay for the computers upfront or lease them from the district, with the option to buy after three years. The payments should work out to about $20 to $25 per month, Hayes said. The cost also includes free tech support.

"We realize for some families that will be a stretch," he said. In those cases, the district will provide financial assistance.

Students who don't participate will be able to borrow a school-provided laptop during the day, but they won't be able to take it home, Hayes said."

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IMO, $20-25/mo is a fair plan. That should be well within the finances of most families, and as they noted, they will provide financial assistance.

That said, using a unified platform is not a bad idea, but why make students buy heavily marked up hardware? Why not Netbooks with Linux?

Re:What are they going to do?

[rickb928]

Well, having had some experience with the Maine Laptop Initiative, their MacBooks did experience downtime due to system problems, and of course inevitable hardware failures.

School administrators that I worked with (I did Novell support for a few schools, and integrating their MacBooks into NetWare was nontrivial, but went pretty well) complained the most about having to re-image drives. They spent quite a bit of time optimizing that process, but there are only a few ways to re-image a MacBook, and none are fast enough. I could not get ZenWorks to do it, despite some heroic work by Novell engineers as a pet project. Oh well...

We were required to re-image the machines to a base system image after many repairs, most specifically hard drives and system boards. Data backup and restoration was the responsibility of the student and local administrators. It's their policy, we just had to follow the rules.

Our little business did well providing non-warranty repairs until both Apple and Apple dealers realized they were being cut out of the loop in a big way. I left before Apple got hard and cut off parts access. That was the end. But we saved some schools a little money along the way.

The MLTI has many lessons for other systems. Worth looking into before your school board leaps off the cliff.