PORTLAND, Maine — A proposed Portland science and technology charter school announced a major deal with Google on Friday to arm each of its students with the software company’s signature Chromebook laptops and wireless Internet accounts.
John Jaques — executive director of the Baxter Academy for Technology and Science, which will be located in a 20,000-square-foot building at 54 York St. if it receives a state permit to open — met with members of Google’s education division at the company headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., last week to complete the laptop lease agreement.
According to a school announcement, the Baxter Academy arrangement represents Google’s largest deployment of the Chromebooks in New England, and the multibillion-dollar firm is counting the school as an important partner as it seeks traction for its 7-month-old laptop line. The school’s decision to link arms with Google also marks a departure from the state of Maine’s 10-year-old relationship with Apple, which has supplied all of the state’s public middle school students with laptops since 2002 as part of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative.
“We’re looking forward to working with Baxter Academy in Portland, and to Baxter becoming a strong regional representative for Google Chromebooks in the Northeast,” said Adam Naor of the Google Chromebook Education Team in a statement.
If the Baxter Academy for Technology and Science opens as planned, students there will have the equipment necessary to plug into the World Wide Web from anywhere in the city.
“One of the things that’s really attractive about the Chromebook is that there’s a model that allows the kids to connect to 3G [mobile networks], so if we’ve got a kid that doesn’t have wireless at home, they can get free Wi-Fi with these Chromebooks,” Jaques told the Bangor Daily News on Friday. “One of the problems with technology today in the hands of kids, is that it tends to be an additional expense on parents, and we wanted to minimize that expense.”
The Chromebooks slated to be leased by the school are manufactured by Samsung and use Google’s Chrome operating system, as well as the Internet company’s slate of office and organizational programs, which will be mutually accessible by teachers and students — meaning instructors at the school will be able to remotely check in on the students’ research, projects and schedules.
“The game-changing advantage Chromebooks represent to educational institutions is making the hardware transparent to the administrator,” said Google engineer Blasie Pabon in a statement released by the school. “There is no need to tie a machine to a particular user, no need to reimage the machine when it fails, no need to migrate data from one machine to another. The machine becomes as generic as a stapler, copier or white board.”
Jaques said academy founders already had decided to use Google’s email, calendar and writing programs in the school, “and when we compared products on the market using those tools, we decided the Chromebook was the best match.”
Jaques would not divulge the amount the school agreed to pay Google in the lease agreement, but said his organization will use funds in its technology account, and that state tuition dollars that would follow each student to the school also include a certain amount for technology.
The Baxter Academy for Technology and Science is seeking to become the first charter school in Maine, under charter school legislation passed by lawmakers last June.
Jaques said school founders hope that by May the Maine Charter School Commission grants them one of the 10 permits allowed by the Legislature over the first 10 years of the charter school program. Jaques said he further expects that lawmakers will adjust the law’s enrollment window — now cemented as a three-week period every January — to allow for schools permitted this spring to accept students for a September 2012 opening.
“I’m encouraged,” Jaques said. “But it will be a tight timeline. It’s basically in the hands of Augusta, now.”
Maine is the 41st state to adopt legislation to allow the schools. The charter school law allows the approval of up to 10 public charter schools in the next 10 years by the Maine State Charter School Commission. In addition, individual public school boards can convert schools within their districts into charter schools, which allows them to create education programs free from some of the restrictions and regulations that apply to public schools.
The latter option is being investigated in Bangor, where the public school district is seeking to establish a specialized STEM high school program within the department.
In Portland, the proposed charter high school is a stand-alone nonprofit organization.
In addition to being able to seek federal grant money set aside to help establish charter schools, the new institutions will be funded by public dollars that follow new students from their traditional school systems. For high school, the state tuition rate per student is about $9,000.
“which allows them to create education programs free from some of the restrictions and regulations that apply to public schools.”
Who made these restrictions and regulations?
The state should be honest and just do away with public schools if it wants to continue to undermine them. This charter school movement is a blatant in your face undermining of the public school system. Funds paid out to private entities with different rules is hardly fair.
Agreed. Why should charter schools get a free pass on regs, and on our dime? Sounds like the inmates running the asylum.
Charter schools are nothing but a private for profit enterprise that government officials (Guess which ones?) have come up with as a solution to a public problem. The problem being poor educational achievement of today’s children. What’s Mr. LePage’s answer? Take money out of public school systems and give it to private for profit enterprises (Now there’s a surprise, right?) who have repeatedly failed or done no better in their efforts than public schools. Dumb, dumb, dumb. No, they are not “Magnet” schools for the gifted nor in general do children attend one of these experiments by choice, who their parents may be, or who their parents think they are. Attendance to charters are usually done by lottery. Learn about them before ripping your public schools to shreds.
Sadly politicians and school administrators don’t keep their jobs by telling people the truth. To justify their positions they always have to provide “solutions” to our problems. The problem with their solutions is that they are usually very convoluted, expensive, and rarely successfully implemented or connected to anything close to a positive result. Don’t be fooled by hucksters who don’t give a hoot about your kids. All they want to do is spread your money for themselves or among their friends/political supporters.
There’s only one real solution to our educational woes, PARENTS who truly care about their children’s education. Get involved in your kids lives and school studies. Pride, hard work, self-worth, and aspirations all “begin” in the home not in schools, on the streets, or through osmotic proximity with a TV, computer, smart phone, or video game. Check their homework, talk to their teachers, and hold them accountable for learning. Otherwise any school they go to will be nothing more than a babysitting service where your kids go to socialize and we keep getting the same poor educational results.
Public education is an antiquated institution. It is time for our state to take the lead and become more progressive on how we educate our young.
And corporations can do any better? At preaching propaganda, maybe.
And public education doesn’t? I would rather have a successful corporation teaching my child than a mediocre educational system.
Hopefully these computers can access more than Google products and services, several of which have inaccuracies and other problems.
Sounds a lot like they are making purchasing decisions on price and not necessarily based on sound educational needs. It is worth noting that schools are starting to try out the Chromebook with interesting results. http://teachinglikeits2999.blogspot.com/2011/12/ipad-chromebook.html