“I think we’re ready to go 1:1, I really do,” said Triad Technology Coordinator Ryan Thompson.
Thompson said three years he asked the district’s teachers if they would be ready for a 1:1 program. At the time, he said the faculty was scared.
“Now, I don’t think you could find a teacher that says, ‘No, I’m not ready,’” Thompson said.
The Chromebook carts the district uses are at a premium now.
“They’re scheduled out for the whole year,” he said.
Right now, Triad has about 600 Chromebooks. Each grade has one cart of 30 laptops. Thompson said the district would need a little more than 300 more to implement at 1:1 program.
“This coming year would be a perfect time to go 1:1,” Thompson said. “We have a couple carts where the automatic updates expire in 2020. So we could give those Chromebooks to the seniors, and then they could just take them with them.”
Triad Superintendent Vickie Hoffman said a 1:1 program would be a good counterpart to the district’s recent initiative to lessen phone use during the day. She said moving to such a system would allow teachers to shift all the lessons they usually have on phones to computers.
“It makes it easier to transition from class to class without going to their lockers,” Hoffman said.
Thompson said the infrastructure is there. He said there’s a wireless access point per two rooms, which he said would be “plenty for how many students we have.”
He said the school’s network would likely be enough to support the district for the next five years.
Board member Matt McConnell asked if any grants were available to the district to offset the cost of a 1:1 initiative.
“I haven’t seen any,” Thompson said.
According to Thompson, grants for programs like these used to be much more common, though they’ve since slowed down.
Elementary School Principal Lee Claypool said her school recently received its fall English/Language Arts (ELA) test scores from the State of Ohio.
She said 20 students are behind in Ohio’s Third Grade Reading Guarantee, a program that aims to improve reading skills in kindergarten to third grade students.
She said to remedy the situation teachers will target writing skills.
“If you can make a kiddo a better writer, you’ll make them a better reader,” Claypool said.
Starting in January, the school will take students struggling with writing and put them through an intervention program to get them up to speed.
In February, those students will be reevaluated, and teachers will go from there. Claypool said teachers could provide additional tutoring.