SAUGUS — Every Saugus student will receive a chromebook for the upcoming school year as part of the district’s new 1-1 chromebook initiative.
The program was announced at last week’s school committee meeting, during which the board voted to approve the first reading of a lengthy safety policy that parents will be required to sign before their student is administered a laptop.
Vice Chair Ryan Fisher said the administration approved the initiative with the hope that providing each child with a district-owned chromebook will help streamline the remote learning process for both students and teachers.
“Back in the spring, many students were sharing computers with siblings or with a parent who was also working from home. It limited the ability to schedule remote classes because not everyone had access at the same time,” said Fisher. “Being able to provide every student with a chromebook eliminates that obstacle and will bring a lot more structure to a remote school day.
“Everyone having the same devices will help a lot.”
Fisher said he’d heard from families of students with otherwise functioning laptops that their child was unable to keep up with online classes last spring due to compatibility issues, either because of their device’s brand, or because they didn’t have necessary updates.
Jennifer D’Eon is one such parent whose family struggled to bridge the technological gap this past spring.
Despite having their own fully-functioning devices at home, D’Eon said her children were frequently marked absent from their classes, and her daughter, a junior at the time, was unable to submit answers for her AP exams due to a compatibility issue with one program in particular.
“She failed,” D’Eon said. “But many, many people had this experience. Nobody knew until it was happening. She (was) killing the exam … then she went to submit her answers and was told she couldn’t. We tried everything.”
Although it can be hard to tell whether the “disconnect” came from her children’s devices or their teachers’, D’Eon said she hopes the 1-1 initiative will prevent similar problems from happening this upcoming school year, which is currently set to begin with full-time remote learning Sept. 16.
“We thought it was going to be easy,” D’Eon said. “It wasn’t easy at all.”
Thankfully, reaching a 1-1 student-chromebook ratio has been a district goal since long before the pandemic, according to Pola Andrews, Executive Director of Finance for Saugus Public Schools.
Most laptops set to be handed out to families in the coming weeks were already purchased by the town in previous years, while funds for the remaining chromebooks were taken from the district’s 2020 operating budget.
“I think there’s an advantage to using a chromebook,” D’Eon said. “It makes everyone equal across the board.”
Parents who don’t wish to participate in the program can choose not to do so by filling out an “opt out” form that can be found on the district website, saugus.k12.ma.us.
Elyse Carmosino can be reached at [email protected].