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Overcast iPads coming to South Side High School
Administration wants to spend $500K on tablets for high school students
The Rockville Centre School District’s administration proposed an ambitious plan at the Dec. 10 Board of Education Meeting to supply all 1,100 students at South Side High School with iPads.
The district currently supplies iPads to all students in the middle school, and has 300 iPads in the high school that teachers can sign up to have their students use on a per diem basis. But with the proposed plan, the district would purchase more than 800 of the tablet computers to make sure that every SSHS student has one every day.
Bringing iPads to the high school is an expansion of the district’s current iPad program at South Side Middle School. Students currently in eighth grade have been working with the machines since sixth grade, and the district didn’t want to suddenly take them away when the students enter the high school next year.
But the class structure at the high school is very different from the middle school. Each grade at the middle school is separate, but they all commingle in the high school. So giving iPads to just the ninth graders wouldn’t be possible, since they’d be in classes with other grades that wouldn’t have them. So all the high school students need the machines.
“It is the medium our students — and certainly nowadays, our teachers — work and live in,” said Christopher Pellettieri, the district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum. “So we need to continue to work in that medium, because that’s where we’re going to find our youngsters. College-level study assumes students can effectively use electronic media.”
Pellettieri outlined the administration’s plan to the Board of Education: the 300 or so iPads that are already in use at the high school would go to the senior class, and the current 8th graders would keep theirs when they move up to 9th grade. But the district would still have to purchase iPads for the 10th and 11th graders, as well as for the incoming 6th graders at the middle school (to replace the iPads moving with the 8th graders).
The administration estimated it would have to purchase 820 iPads, along with cases, which would cost approximately $512,500.
