Bar Harbor parents try out laptops, learn rules for use at home

BAR HARBOR – Kaileigh Porter pushed her laptop computer toward her father, Timothy Porter. He leaned toward the screen and began to type, his large fingers dwarfing the keys. Slowly and carefully, he typed the letters on the screen, favoring his index and middle fingers.

“No, Dad. Use all your fingers,” his 12-year-old daughter instructed.

The seventh-grader shook her head and took back control of the computer. Patiently, she showed her father how to type using all his fingers, then checked their scores on the Master Key Profiler. She typed 35 words a minute to her father’s 10.

“Well,” he conceded, “your fingers are a lot younger than mine are.”

Similar scenes were repeated Wednesday night throughout the cafeteria of the Conners Emerson School as parents saw firsthand how their children are using laptop computers in the classroom. Later this month, pupils will take their Apple iBooks home for the first time.

Conners Emerson is one of nine schools named “exploration and demonstration sites” for Gov. Angus King’s laptop plan, which calls for placing the machines in the hands of all seventh-graders next fall and with all seventh- and eighth-graders next year.

Bar Harbor’s 54 seventh-graders began using the laptops March 21.

School officials on Wednesday outlined the guidelines for home use and asked parents to sign permission slips, which must be returned before the laptops can be taken home to complete assignments after April vacations.

Pupils will not be able to access the Internet from home, but will be able to save information downloaded at school, then use it at home for assignments, reports and projects, explained Principal Barbara Neilly.

Kaileigh Porter said she was looking forward to taking her laptop home. At home, two adults and two children share one personal computer, she said.

“I can do more work and less talking [online],” she said about the advantage of being able to take her laptop home.

Her mother, Margaret Porter, said that the laptops would make it possible for children who were sick or in the hospital or on vacation to have their assignments e-mailed to them, and they would not have to wait until they returned to school to catch up.

Questions about liability issues and the future of the program dominated the discussion portion of the evening, but a large majority of the parents expressed support for the governor’s controversial initiative.

“I think it’s great. I’m behind it 100 percent,” said Jerome Goff, whose son Evans Goff showed his father a social studies project stored on his laptop. “I’m sorry it took so much political wrangling to get them here. This is a learning curve for all of us – kids, teachers and parents.”

As for liability, Apple is covering any damage to the laptops at school, at home and in between, Neilly told the gathering. In subsequent years, parents would be liable for damage that occurred when pupils use the computers at home. The Department of Education is looking into the possibility of laptop computer insurance that parents could purchase for as low as $5 per month, she added.

“One parent compared the laptop to a school-owned band instrument,” Assistant Principal Mike Martin-Zboray said after the meeting. “Students and parents are responsible for taking proper care of those instruments.”

Denise White, mother of Chelsea White, said that as a single mother, she was concerned about who would be liable for the laptop when her daughter visited her father. She also wanted to know if pupils on sports teams would be able to take them on the bus when they traveled to sporting events and what arrangements had been made with the Mount Desert Island YMCA to secure the laptops during after-school programs.

Martin-Zboray recommended that both parents sign consent forms if the laptop were to be used in separate households. He doubted that laptops would travel to sporting events this year and told parents that the school was working with officials at the Y, which about 20 children attend, to ensure that computers could be secured there.

Other rules outlined included: no carrying laptops in backpacks; laptops must be used in a supervised public place in the home; and they must be recharged overnight at home. In addition to those rules, school officials said that siblings could not use laptops, but parents could do so, provided they were supervised by their seventh-grader.

As the meeting ended, White signed the consent form for her daughter, but said she still worried about damage to the laptop.

“I’m still concerned about what happens if it gets broken,” she said. “It’s an expensive thing to give a child, but 30 years from now, this will be like a crayon was for our kids.”