The final report the Task Force on the Maine Learning Technology Endowment presented to the Legislature this week is a practical refinement of the proposal Gov. King announced just 11 months ago to equip all students from the seventh grade through high school with laptop computers. Almost as remarkable as the task force’s ability to address legitimate concerns about the proposal is the way the swarm of silly and offensive objections that greeted the governor’s announcement last March has dwindled to an absurd few.

The Legislature did not exactly cover itself in glory with its initial response to the laptop plan. It was dismaying that so many lawmakers chose to respond to the challenge of making Maine more competitive in the technological future by asserting that those Maine seventh-graders who didn’t drop, lose or pawn the technology would use it to look at dirty pictures. The sudden fervor among lawmakers to fix such long-neglected problems as leaky school roofs was the height of cynicism.

Buried within those offensive objections are grains of the legitimate concerns the task force has ably addressed. The switch from full-blown laptop computers to mid-clients – machines that have limited power unless connected to a network – puts into the hands of students machines that cost less, are more rugged and are of considerably less value to thieves. This server-oriented technology is, most experts say, the direction in which computing is heading; in this case, it also allows some control over content, an important consideration with young students. Keeping the machines school-owned instead of student owned deflates the “giveaway” argument and rightly puts computers into the category in which they belong – as the 21st century equivalent of the textbook. Limiting this program to only seventh and eighth-graders is a troubling down-sizing, but it is fair to expect it will expand to high schools once the benefits of daily, one-on-one access to technology become apparent.

Many members of the task force, individuals with expertise in lawmaking, education, technology, business and finance, said they are converted skeptics on this matter. Many legislators says the same thing, but add that the $50 million endowment created last year is fair game as they try to close the $200-million-plus budget gap. That is not only false economy but leaky-roof cynicism of a more subtle degree – one need only scan the silly spending and narrowly targeted tax breaks included in the 1,800 bills submitted by legislators this session to see why. The arguments against this technology plan have been whittled away so effectively that the leading objection now heard in the State House is the bizarre accusation that Gov. King made this laptop proposal only to ensure himself of some kind of ego-boosting legacy. Why Gov. King would to try to fabricate a legacy with an idea he knew would be greeted with derision and ridicule is never explained. If the governor does get a legacy out of this, it will be as one who believed that a good idea flourishing elsewhere might take root here.

In fact, if there is one quibble with the governor’s handling of this proposal it would be that he persisted too long in presenting this as a way for Maine to lead. One-on-one, daily access to computers is reality for students as young as the fourth grade in counties in Iowa and Georgia, in New York City, in entire provinces in Australia, throughout Taiwan. Gov. King suggested in his State of the State address that the blistering pace of advancing technology creates fleeting opportunities to lead, lots of time to bring up the rear. And bringing up the rear, once again, will be this Legislature’s legacy if it raids the technology endowment.