Over 1,000 new laptops arrive for all seventh graders

The Public School System received Friday morning a shipment of 1,100 brand new laptops for seventh graders in both public and private schools in the CNMI.

PSS federal programs officer Tim Thornburgh confirmed yesterday that students of Chacha Oceanview Junior High School were the first batch of seventh graders to get their units.

The rest are scheduled for delivery this week to other middle schools on Saipan, Tinian, and Rota.

Thornburgh said the laptops cost a total of $465,000, with the money coming from the American Recovery Reinvestment Act’s consolidated grant for fiscal year 2011.

This third batch of laptop distribution is part of the PSS One-Laptop-Per-Child project initiated last school year.

Thornburgh said that PSS will continue giving all seventh graders each year brand new laptops as part of the commitment of the Board of Education and Education Commissioner Dr. Rita A. Sablan to provide modern technology to secondary students to aid them in their learning.

“The One-Laptop-Per-Child program will be ongoing every year because as senior students graduate and new seventh graders are coming in, we need to make these technologies readily available for their use,” Thornburgh said.

The Dr. Rita Hocog Inos Junior and High School and Tinian Jr. and High School were scheduled to receive their laptops yesterday.

According to Jack V. Diaz, PSS federal programs coordinator, the new laptops are Dell 2012 netbooks with the same specifications as last year’s deliveries, but with updated memory and no touchscreen feature.

Diaz said that Chacha Oceanview Junior High got 178 units; Hopwood Junior High will get 864 units for seventh graders; 55 for Rota; and 35 units for Tinian.

For private schools, he said that PSS projects to give away 108 units this year.

The new units have bar codes for tracking purposes and are blocked from accessing certain networks for safety. They are also equipped with camera and WiFi.

Although PSS enrollment is not yet final, Diaz is confident that the 1,100 units are “enough” to cover all intended beneficiaries.

PSS procured over 6,000 netbooks for seventh to 12th graders in public and private schools last school year.

Diaz admitted that PSS has no idea about the number of units that were reportedly damaged or under repair as students go directly to Megabyte.

Meantime, Thornburgh said the education board and the PSS leadership are now looking at possible ways on how Kindle e-readers and iPad tablets can be made available to students.