There was no way around it. The 340 or so students to enroll that first year at Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., would be laptop guinea pigs. They would be part of an experiment to see if computers and the Internet would give teachers the flexibility to cover a world of knowledge outside textbooks.
Empire High did not leap into the future. Even before its doors opened in fall 2005, a year of planning went into creating a campus without textbooks.
Here was the idea: Knowledge would come from the Internet, channeled by laptop computers. Every student would have one.
Empire math teacher Melinda Jensen — along with parents and administrators — helped craft the program. It was a community effort. Once in place, Empire would be open to every student in the sprawling Vail Unified School District on the southeast side of Tucson.
However, planners soon realized that what they were doing had no precedent, try as they might to find one, Jensen says.
“We visited several schools, and we talked to a lot of people, but no one was doing what we wanted to do,” she said. “So the challenge was picturing it and just completely creating it.”
Empire educators also wanted to know if the computers would allow teachers more flexibility in gearing lessons to state standards.
These standards underpin what high school students need to know to pass AIMS, short for Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards. It’s a high-stakes test, meaning if students don’t pass, they don’t graduate.
As one of AIMS’ chief proponents, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne backs the idea of replacing textbooks with laptops. When it comes to content, he adds, the price is right.
“The laptops give… access to much more information than a textbook would,” Horne says. “There’s a wealth of information on the Internet that’s free.”
For Empire, the venture brought a wealth of publicity. Newspapers from as far away as Pakistan picked up the story about the American high school giving up textbooks for computers.
Amid all the attention, Vail Superintendent Calvin Baker kept to the message that the program was still an experiment.
“We certainly had high hopes, but we didn’t know it if was going to work,” Baker says.
Now they know. Laptop learning is no longer just an experiment, he says.
“It’s part of the institution,” he says.
Challenges: funding, universal Internet access
Along the way, however, Baker says there have been challenges. The first was funding — coming up with the money to put a laptop in every backpack.
Empire had a big advantage, though. Going digital out of the starting gate, it never bothered buying textbooks in the first place, Baker says. For established schools, the transition would not be as easy.
“They already have their textbooks. They’ve already spent their money,” Baker says.
However, laptops still cost more per student than new textbooks — about $800 compared to $500 to $600 on textbooks, according to Baker.
Vail, however, came up with the money — for laptops and other needs — in good part through a land trade with a developer. In exchange for the original site, Vail got a new school site and a few million dollars in cash.
The laptops, however, wouldn’t be much good without Internet connections. The school would be wired, but students were expected to do homework on their computers. If they weren’t connected at home, they couldn’t do research.
During planning, at least one parent worried about a digital divide.
Jann Rempfer worked on the planning committee for Empire. Her son is now a junior at the school.
Her home already had a high-speed Internet connection, she says. But many of the district’s rural areas did not. And, even if they had access, Rempfer wondered whether they could afford to pay for it.
Her fears, she says, were put to rest.
Led by Baker, Rempfer says, the district worked with Dakota Internet Services to make a high-speed connection available to every student in the district. The service — for those who chose it — was priced at $12 a month.
Keeping inquiring minds on task
Another challenge, once school began, was to keep students from accessing sites deemed off-limits.
“Usually, it’s My Space, but there are instances where it’s a little worse than that,” says Wayne Gritis, Empire’s site technology coordinator.
Gritis’ job is to make sure the school’s networks and Internet connections are working. He also monitors the Internet surfing by students. Ordinarily, laptops can connect to the Internet only by going through a filter that Gritis himself has set up. Even at home, student content is filtered through the school’s proxy server.
Still, he has caught some logging onto blocked sites like My Space. A few have even visited porn sites. They get around the filter through proxy bypasses.
But Gritis is not fooled, usually.
“It’ll show up on my radar,” he says. “And I’ll investigate and then find this proxy, and I’ll hand that information over to the assistant principal.”
Students sometimes complain, though, that the restrictions get in the way of homework. That includes David Gritis, 17-year-old junior and Wayne’s son.
Occasionally, students need to get on a blocked site for research. They can, if they go through the proper channels, David says.
“Usually they have to talk to the teacher and have the teacher send an e-mail to my father, and he goes onto the Web site that is on the filter and takes that Web site off for a day or two,” David says. “Big, painful process.”
But it’s not all Big Brother. While students can’t use laptops for instant messaging, they can e-mail. (That’s a recent concession on the part of school officials.) They also can use their Apple Macbooks to download iTunes.
Rempfer, a parent, sees another bonus for students. Laptops are just way cooler than textbooks.
“When this started, you could see the kids carrying them everywhere,” she says. “They were carrying them like newborn babies in their hands.”
And David Gritis has no complaints about laptops as a learning tool. In this, he agrees with teachers and administrators, including his father.
For David, one big advantage has been in organizing his work, as well as his thoughts.
“Especially in English, I mean my writing has really improved … being able to know how to spell words finally,” he says.
For Baker, the superintendent, the Internet provides students with material they won’t find in any textbook — original sources at the click of a mouse. In social studies, for example, students can find the documents that underlie American history.
“Kids can read the real stuff that was written — not somebody’s interpretation of it,” Baker says.
Other sites, like Beyond Books, offer subscription-based school lessons — somewhat like textbooks, but with greater flexibility.
As for teachers, the good ones do not miss teaching out a text, Jensen says.
“The stronger teachers will always be finding resources beyond the textbook,” she says.
Pencil and paper for math
On the other hand, old-fashioned pencil and paper works better for some things, like solving math problems, Jensen says. And a few of Empire’s higher-level ma
th classes still use textbooks.
Still, Jensen says, the Web remains the best place for math resources — many of them free.
“There are a lot of different references that have been created by universities for all the different levels of math,” she says.
She won’t go back to teaching from textbooks, she adds.
“I love the flexibility of working straight off the state standards,” she says.
It apparently has worked. Recently released AIMS test results show that Empire compares favorably in math, reading and writing to the state as a whole. Looking at AIMS math scores for spring 2007, for example, 88 percent of Empire sophomores passed compared to 69 percent for all Arizona 10th graders and 79 percent for the entire Vail District.
Technology can’t get all the credit for better scores
But school officials are hesitant to pin progress wholly on technology.
Baker says Empire’s principal, Cindy Lee, gets offended when people credit laptops for good scores.
“I would agree with her that if there’s not a laptop within 10 miles of school, odds are they’d have very good scores, because they have a very excellent staff,” Horne says.
Horne, no doubt, appreciates good teaching. But he also sees a future of laptops within 10 miles of every school. He said as much in his “state of education” speech to lawmakers early in 2007.
“The long-term vision is that every student in the state above a certain age will have his or her own laptop,” Horne said.
As a first step, he asked the Legislature for $2.5 million to set up pilot programs in seven Arizona high schools, including Vail’s own charter high school. Instead, the Legislature, in its final budget, provided no laptop funds for any high schools — opting instead to appropriate $1 million for an elementary-school program.
The outcome did not please Horne.
“I thought this was the worst budget process I’d ever seen,” he says.
On laptop funding, the House and Senate budget negotiators ignored committee recommendations, he says.
Rep. Andy Tobin, R-1, vice chairman of the House Education (K-12) Committee, voted for Horne’s laptop request. More generally, Tobin shares Horne’s vision in putting laptops in every school.
But Tobin says laptops should be supported by curriculum software.
“What I would like to see Superintendent Horne do is develop a statewide curriculum for high school classes and make it available to high schools,” Tobin says. “So that now what we have is statewide curriculum on diskettes.”
Horne says that while standards — the ones tested by AIMS — are statewide, “districts are responsible for their own curriculum.”
But he adds: “Whether we should make a state curriculum to be available to schools that want it is probably something that should be explored.”
He plans to go back with additional requests next year. Meanwhile, three of the high schools turned away by lawmakers have opted to go digital on their own, Horne says.
Outside Arizona, schools also are looking into laptop learning. As a starting point, officials often make a pilgrimage to Empire. The school recently hosted visitors from a school district in Louisiana, Baker says. They planned to convert a 70- to 80-year-old campus into an Internet-based learning site.
Teachers adjusting to just the right level of laptop learning
If they make the change, it might take them a few years for them to find their comfort zone. During Empire’s first year, for example, teachers thought students needed to use their laptops for every assignment.
“The first year, we used the laptops as much as we possibly could, and some think we used them too much,” she says.
The second year teachers backed off a bit, and — in the eyes of some — perhaps too much.
“I think the third year we’re finding the balance,” she adds.
Just the same, a typical day at an Empire classroom will find students sitting behind their white Apple laptops, half-hidden by the open screens.
Students pay $80 premium for insurance
Chances are one of those laptops is a loaner, with the original out for repairs. Because with teenagers, things get broken — largely by accident.
David Gritis, son of the school’s technical coordinator, is a case in point.
“Yes, I’ve dropped mine a few times, unfortunately,” Gritis says. “I think I’ve broken it two or three times.”
Empire planners took the accidental nature of high school students into account. Each student (or more likely, each student’s parent) pays an insurance premium of about $80. If a computer is damaged, there’s a $100 deductible on the repair. Gritis has an arrangement worked out. He splits the deductibles with his father.
One good thing about the Apple laptops, David says. They’re sturdy.
“You gotta drop them in the right way,” he says.
But laptops sometimes malfunction on their own, through no fault of the student. Gritis, for example, lost a month’s work his freshman year. Luckily, his teachers let him make it up.
Gritis’s father, Wayne, says software glitches have chewed up assignments. But Jensen and other teachers suspect that — in some cases — the “computer ate my homework” is simply an excuse. Claims of work lost to cyberspace will likely get greater scrutiny, she adds.
It’s all part of the laptop learning curve, and the experiment.