Are you still wondering whether Gov. Angus King’s laptop plan will work? If you are, just keep an eye on what’s going on in Guilford, at the Piscataquis Community Middle School.

With generous help from the town’s biggest industry, Guilford of Maine, the school has bought 100 laptops, enough for each eighth-grader to have one this year. Next year, every student in grades 5 through 8 will have one. The Guilford project started with a pilot plan last year. Three teachers got a technology grant and bought 17 Apple iBooks that were shared all year by eighth-graders. Then the textile company stepped in with a matching grant of $50,000 a year for two years.

So this town of 2,500 is running a pilot plan for the entire state. Not just the state, for the entire nation, says Principal Greg Bellemare, pointing out that only a few other schools in the country have gone so far. “We’re on what you’d call the cutting edge,” he says.

Mr. Bellemare and the teachers have already found that the laptops not only help the brightest students but also inspire the so-so students, those who don’t like school much. The project gets them together with a device much like the push-button electronic video and game gadgets that they use in their spare time. School suddenly seems like fun. The school’s aim is the same as the governor’s – to create a better trained, sophisticated Maine work force for the future.

A special feature of the Guilford project is a wireless system, in which the laptops can be used throughout the school. Instead of connecting wires, the computers will get their software and Internet connections through signals from central “airports.”

One difference between the Piscataquis project and Gov. King’s proposal is that the Guilford students cannot take their laptops home with them. Students check them out like library books for use at school but check them back in for overnight charging and maintenance. This should allay the fears by some that the students won’t take proper care of the laptops.

At Guilford of Maine, Mary Alyce Higgins, the company’s vice president of human resources, isn’t worried about the safety of the laptops. She says people at the company take laptops home all the time, with few mishaps. Occasionally one of them gets dropped or someone spills coffee on one of them. These things happen, she says, but they can be dealt with, and the iBooks are pretty rugged machines.

So the pilot project in Guilford is going well. You can soon check its progress on the school district’s Web page, sad4.com. And you can watch the Piscataquis region become known in the future as a good place to do business because of a work force that is technologically up to speed.