Chesapeake Elementary, which sits across the street from mobile homes and near coal-filled rail cars in its namesake Kanawha River town, was the recipient of 20 desktop computers, five notebook computers and four printers — a collective gift used to mark the savings milestone.
Dave Cartwright, the West Virginia Department of Education’s technology infrastructure manager, said $2 million represents what schools in 33 counties would’ve had to pay for more than 6,000 devices.
Instead, through the Second Launch WV program he helped develop, schools have received used state technology for free that normally would have been declared surplus and sent to a Dunbar warehouse, where it might have been auctioned off to the public.
Cartwright said the program started because about 70 percent of computers in schools were running older Windows XP operating systems but the government was putting computers running the Windows 7 operating system into surplus.
“We were getting rid of stuff that’s newer than what we have in the schools,” he said.
State Schools Superintendent Michael Martirano, Kanawha Schools Superintendent Ron Duerring and other schools officials attended the event Wednesday. The education department, which is partnering with the West Virginia Office of Technology on the program, said the equipment donated to Second Launch is wiped of information, cleaned and upgraded to meet the requirements of programs that schools use.
Cartwright, who said he works with only a few people to run the program, said he talks with each school system’s technology contact to determine which schools need the donations the most. He said he’s now working with pre-kindergarten programs to get them devices.
Chesapeake Principal Marianne Annie said the 187-student school already has about three desktop computers and five or six tablet computers in each of its classrooms, and all the classrooms now will get at least two more computers. The printers will be shared, and the one color printer will go into the library.
“It really helps make the groups smaller if they want to do group work,” Annie said of the technology.
She said she had just been in a classroom where three students were on desktops doing a math program, a few more were on tablets and a few more were working with textbooks.
Martirano said Wednesday that he wants every public school student to have access to his or her own computer in school.
Research has raised doubts about the effectiveness of technology in raising student achievement, although Martirano has noted that Internet-accessing devices don’t have the same limits on content that “static” textbooks do.
Annie said having more devices provides more opportunities for students to work at different levels — those who are ahead of the rest of their class can work separately from those who are struggling or might have been absent, and who need to work at another level to catch up.
One of the programs the school uses is Achieve 3000, a reading comprehension program that assigns students a level through a test at the beginning of the year.
©2016 The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, W.Va.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
