More than laptops

A petition campaign by legislators to further siphon funds from the governor’s technology initiative is being portrayed as nothing more than making a choice between frills and essentials. Laptop computers for middle-schoolers may be nice, but such things as General Purpose Aid to education and helping the poor, sick and elderly are necessary.

Sometimes choices are that simple. This is not one of those times. The choice these petitioning lawmakers are asking their colleagues to make and the public to accept is between progress and retreat. Between long-term vision and short-term expediency.

Perhaps most importantly, it is a choice between keeping a commitment and wriggling out of one. Maine is facing a $250-million budget gap. This is a difficult situation (though not as difficult as that faced by most other states) and the reordering of priorities it demands calls for sacrifice. The technology fund created by the Legislature just a year and a half ago already has made its sacrifice – it has been cut from $53 million to $25 million, including the $5 million Gov. King recently tossed into the gap. No other program of state government has taken such a hit.

GPA and assisting those in need are important. They also were important the last several years when Maine was rolling up enormous surpluses and lawmakers could think of no better use for it than to expand business-assistance programs that are famous for not creating jobs, to cut the sales tax on potato chips, to bankroll silly public-works projects.

There is an awful irony at work when legislators stand at the House’s new $40,000 imported wood rostrum and denounce hands-on, daily student access to technology as excessive. The future of education and the best chance Maine will ever have to equalize opportunity for students in its poor, rural districts deserves better than to be used to cover up bad policy.

Even those who remain opposed to the laptop plan should be appalled at what these legislators are attempting. The Department of Education, acting with the explicit approval of the last Legislature, just a month ago signed a contract with Apple for the iBooks, the Internet connections and the teacher training that will make this work, a contract that includes an estimated $15 million worth of free services, hardware and assistance. Now, lawmakers – many of whom backed creating the technology fund when it suited their horse-trading needs – are talking openly, unashamedly, of breaking that contract.

Maine people expect their legislators to make informed decisions and to be, to the greatest extent possible, consistent. They must demand that lawmakers conduct themselves with honesty and that they do nothing to ruin this state’s good name.

That’s why this is about more than laptops.