Chat Room - Loaning Laptops

Although more than 60 percent of K-12 students now have PCs at home, that means, of course, that more than 30 percent still don't. Those of us following discussions about the digital divide know that not having a computer at home to do homework is a hefty handicap. Lizette Hannegan realized this dilemma while working in a middle school library several years ago. "I kept the library open until the last buses had left," says the supervisor for library and information services for the Arlington (VA) Public Schools. "And I noticed a regular pod of eager, motivated students who would be working at the library computers until the last minute." They were neither surfing the Web nor playing games. When she asked the students why they were always there, they told her it was the only way they could write assignments, such as essays, that required a word processor.

Hannegan never forgot about those students, and when she had a chance to apply for a federal Title VI "Innovative Strategies for Education" grant, she proposed "Laptops for Loan," a project that would supply laptops to all three high schools in the Arlington district. Under her plan, high school librarians would barcode computers as if they were books, enter them into the library catalog, and check them out to students who needed them.

When the $122,000 project was funded, Hannegan oversaw the purchase of 73 Dell laptop computers. They were basic models with floppy drives and dial-up modems, but no network cards—not the kind of laptops high-tech whiz kids or gamers would line up to borrow. The only loaded software was America Online and Microsoft Office, plus DeepFreeze to prevent students from changing settings or saving documents to the hard drive. The remaining grant money was spent on an extended service agreement and insurance, so the laptops could be replaced if they were stolen or damaged.

Since last fall, laptops have been available on a first-come, first-served basis, and Hannegan happily reports that it's been as big a success as she had hoped. Arlington is a very diverse town, with wealthy and poor areas, and many students come from computer-less families. The 26 laptops assigned to the heavily Hispanic and African-American Wakefield High School, which has 1,600 students, have circulated more than 1,200 times over the past school year, largely to students without home computers. Although the school libraries have an overnight checkout policy in order to give everyone an opportunity to borrow the laptops, the librarians have an option to be flexible. "The overnight policy," says Hannegan, "was not strictly enforced when they knew a student had a paper due in two or three days." What she didn't anticipate was that students would treat the laptops so well and take the project so seriously. None were stolen, and none were carelessly damaged. Obviously the students who borrowed them, she feels, cared about the laptops and wanted to make sure they'd be available long-term.

The project kicked off in the schools with a laptop orientation—a PowerPoint presentation with digital photos showing how to set up and use the laptops. Students also needed signed permission from parents acknowledging that they were aware their children were bringing home expensive, delicate technology. Every student involved in the program received a free AOL account. (Hannegan persuaded AOL, an Arlington-area company, to donate the e-mail accounts for educational use.) Since students weren't allowed to save large files on the hard drive, they e-mailed their homework to the school server. When students had to give PowerPoint presentations or hand in poetry research papers to their English teachers, the assignments were easily accessible at school.

One of the goals of the Laptops for Loan project is to encourage participating students to make greater use of the libraries' subscription databases and encyclopedias—Grolier Online, SIRS, and EBSCO. Students tell Hannegan they use the databases, and she's awaiting final statistics on database use from the folks at AOL. Overall, Hannegan says there's been one recurring surprise from students: they say they don't use the laptops that often to go online. "They told me that being able to get their assignments done," she says, "was more important than being able to go online."