A recent news story noting the lack of funds for the state’s laptop program in its middle schools has one policy analyst observing that the laptops may not be in the next budget because “states want to cut things that aren’t going to directly affect the classroom.” That attitude is precisely the misunderstanding the Maine Learning Technology Initiative faces – that laptops, despite their immediate success in classroom after classroom, could be removed without affecting what happens in those classrooms.

Seventh-grade teachers report that laptops improve attendance and the quality of student work, provide a wider range of course materials, allow students to use significantly more up-to-date information and create that most important of all traits: enthusiasm for learning. They are in many ways more important than the textbooks schools would not consider giving up. Would removing laptops directly affect the classroom? Of course.

After a long struggle to persuade lawmakers that putting these learning tools into the hands of every seventh- and eighth-grader wasn’t a frill but a remarkably important change in thinking about education, the future of the laptops comes down to money. The King administration foresaw this problem when it proposed the idea in 2000. It wanted to use state revenue surplus to create an endowment for the program and so avoid the kind of funding argument Maine has had and is about to have again. Lawmakers back then, some of whom initially seemed to have confused laptops with Gameboys, could barely bring themselves to support the technology initiative. They cut the endowment at their first opportunity.

Laptops provide equity of information that no level of fine-tuning the state school-funding formula can touch; the program does more to send resources to the state’s poorest schools than any study commission on the problem ever has. And other states have caught on to this idea. In Michigan, Illinois, New York, New Hampshire, Virginia and elsewhere schools are ensuring that students have access to laptops – and access means that all students have a computer. The federal government this year will spend $2.7 billion in support of this and similar technology.

Fortunately, Gov. John Baldacci has signaled since the beginning of his administration that he understood the value of the technology program. He will have the chance over the next several years to use information taken from the initial experience with laptops in Maine classrooms to refine and expand the program. He can keep Maine at the forefront of this successful technology, ensuring that students continue to use these tools in high school, just as they are likely to use them in college.

Legislators with continuing doubts about the importance of the technology initiative should visit the middle-school classrooms where the laptops are being used daily. They should see how students are learning in new ways, opening up new possibilities for understanding and for success in Maine’s classrooms.