Laptops are no longer a luxury for students Schools clear off desktops, shift expense to parents as wired classes become norm

By Karen Thomas
USA TODAY

Pens, $2. Paper, $3. Binder, $10. Calculator, $100. Laptop, $1,500.

The school-supplies list at the high school level is expanding in big leaps these days, as many schools around the USA -- mostly private -- make laptop ownership a requirement. Some public schools, grappling with merging technology and classroom in-struction, are experimenting with the role laptops play.

''Everyone here is using one all the time. It is truly ubiquitous at this school,'' says David Smith, headmaster of Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, N.H., a private boarding high school with 350 students and 2,300 laptop plug-in ports on campus. Laptops first joined the must-have supply list there in 1993.

Next week, when classes start at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Va., the school will be a fully laptop-only institution. Four years ago, the school started phasing in laptops by requiring all freshmen to have one.

In less than four years, the number of high schools where laptops have replaced the computer lab has risen to more than 500 nationwide, says Albert Throckmorton, Episcopal's director of technology curriculum. He was part of a similar launch at a Houston school. Since then, an annual summit of laptop-only schools has grown from invitation-only to an event with more than 1,000 participants, he says, equally from public and private schools.

''I don't know that any of these schools are pursuing this because of the virtue of laptops,'' he says. ''We still don't know if this is going to move to the personal digital assistant, or smaller computers, or is it moving toward distance learning and the universal classroom? It's not that this particular machine in and of itself is the holy grail. It's just the first generation of portable machines that work in schools.''

But by far the biggest obstacle is the enormous cost of shifting the expense of the traditional computer lab to a parent-student responsibility.

''Schools have to commit themselves,'' Throckmorton says. ''Whatever financial aid they made available for tuition, they have to offer that same hand for technology.''

At Episcopal, students can buy or rent laptops or apply for ''scholarship computers.'' At Brewster, students lease laptops and can purchase or trade up in their senior year.

Villa Park High School, a public school in Orange, Calif., has been successful in offering eHistory and eEnglish electives for those students who supply their own laptops. But a similar proposal at another Orange County school met with disapproval from parents who felt the program would exclude poorer students. Now educators and parents at McPherson Magnet School are working on a program offering a buy/lease option or the purchase of used equipment to launch a pilot laptop school this year.

The ''connection'' is what lured Katie Thornton, 16, to Brewster three years ago. But the link she's talking about is kinship that comes when all players on the education team, students and faculty, have a laptop. ''That sense of community comes from the computers,'' she says. ''To be able to e-mail the headmaster is a lot different than a lot of other schools.

''I think that's so important in being able to connect with my school, but also with everyone else in the world.''

Preparing kids for today's world, Throckmorton says, is part of the rationale behind the shift to laptops. ''The idea was to look at a real-world model: You learn when you need to learn. You don't go into a special room to learn word processing when you don't have a report due. The idea of one-to-one access was the goal.''

This school year, Episcopal laptops will reach beyond the classroom even more. ''In science, they will have digital probes that will collect data in real time from experiments and load it into a spreadsheet. Students will take home data and spend time analyzing and interpreting data instead of entering it into a chart,'' Throckmorton says.

For the football team, playbooks are intranet hyperlinks that players access from dorm rooms. Coaches' chalk talk is a computer program with animated players instead of X's and O's.

The success at Brewster, where SAT scores have risen more than 90 points, relies less on the hardware, Smith says, and more on teacher training and schoolwide philosophies and curriculum. ''The laptop is the child on the parade route for the emperor. Open it up, it says, 'What do you want me to do?' '' Smith says. ''If the school hasn't defined itself and doesn't know what it's doing, the computer will point that out. That's the case in the vast majority of schools.''

College-bound Thornton credits her educational success there on expectations that she would use computer presentations and other technologies to share her new knowledge with peers. ''If I know it well enough to teach it, I know it pretty well.''