The federal government originally provided $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to enhance technology in classrooms across 12 states, including North Carolina. Polk County Schools received about $200,000 of that money, although part of those funds had to be returned to the state for the creation of the state’s cloud (Internet) services.
“I can’t use this Race to the Top money to hire anyone; I can’t use it to fix our state budget problems,” Miller said. “So, if we didn’t use it to fund this program we’d have to use it toward some other technology initiative.”
This is the second year of those funds, but while Polk County has spent some of the money on wireless technology for some of its schools and other small technology projects here and there, most of it has been saved.
In comparison, Scherping told board members that nearby Madison Schools spent $1.2 million to provide laptops to every student in its high school.
Meanwhile, Polk plans to set up portable sets of Chromebooks in the English, science and social studies classrooms that can move to other classrooms as needed.
“We’ve had students using them already at the high school in Mrs. Weicker’s class,” Scherping said. “She doesn’t ever want us to take them away.”
Scherping said many other systems that chose one-to-one programs did a lot of staff development with their teachers, but the teachers didn’t really know what questions to ask.
So, Polk plans to give the classrooms the Chromebooks with about two months left in the school year to give teachers a little experience with them. They can then think over the summer about questions they have and how best to use the technology in their classrooms next year.
Miller said he believes that eventually students will be using these devices to take state tests and he has no doubt the use of such technology in the classrooms could improve students’ technological competency before they reach the college level or workforce, where many companies already work within the cloud system.
“I think this is definitely where technology is going. Students are going to have to be used to working like this,” Miller said.