Charlottesville School Board candidates agree that computers can replace textbooks in the classroom, but some are still critical of the city’s new tablet computer initiative, calling it expensive and questioning whether parents and teachers had enough input in the decision to move it forward.
Guian McKee, interim school board member and current candidate who supports the plan, said in a press conference Tuesday that the first priority of Charlottesville City Schools’ new strategic plan is for every child in city schools to “be prepared to participate actively in the world of the 21st century, ready to make a contribution to society."
McKee, a public policy professor at the UVA Batten School, lauded the Blended Learning to Advance Student Thinking initiative (BLAST), known more generally as the tablet initiative, as a program that will help students be ready for the workplace.
“Our students need to be and will be skilled in digital research, fluent in digital information management and responsible for managing that technology,” he said.
Under BLAST, city schools will give every student, grades 6-12, a tablet computer. Only Charlottesville High School students will be able to take the tablet home, while students at Walker Upper Elementary and Buford Middle School will leave theirs at school. McKee addressed the controversy BLAST created among parents regarding the cost of the program and the use of technology in the classroom during his press conference.
More after the photo.
“BLAST has gotten a lot of attention in recent months, some it, frankly, critical,” he said. For him, “the big picture has been lost a little bit in this discussion of which technology of how much it costs.”
The board approved a $2.4 million investment for more than 2,000 tablets—each tablet costs $1,167 with hardware, software, services and implementation already included—and yearly maintenance costs, which run about $450,000 a year. The tablets have already been purchased.
Fellow school board candidate Amy Laufer, who came out to support McKee at the press conference, said the investment was “appropriate.” “I think what people don’t realize is that we buy three textbooks per student per subject,” she told C-VILLE. Laufer adds that with tablets, the schools will have more flexibility in creating the curriculum. “We can make the curriculum that we want, not what the textbook companies are offering us. We can have a more local curriculum,” she said.
Some critics, however, say the tablets are way too expensive. Fellow candidate Steven Latimer, opposes the initiative, but encourages people to have patience with a program that is so new. 

“These [tablets] cost $1,100 per tablet and we could have purchased cheaper laptops for only $200 or $300,” Latimer told C-VILLE. “I am not against having a classroom of tablets that you can share. You can do more with a laptop than with a tablet.”
For Jennifer McKeever, local attorney and fellow candidate vying for one of four open seats on the board, the vision behind the initiative is positive, but she doesn’t know if she would have made the same decision.
“I think a lot of stakeholders, like parents and community members who have insight that could have been offered with respect to the programs, were not included in those decisions,” she told C-VILLE.
Although she said she would not revisit the decision, McKeever sees the lack of wireless access in the city’s public housing sites as a bigger priority, calling it a “huge problem.” 

“When we have 20 percent of our students going hungry every weekend and every day, it’s not reasonable to expect them to pay $10 a month for internet access,” she said.
McKeever, who is the chair of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, has already asked the City Parks and Recreation Department about putting wireless service in the sites and the city’s community centers and said the funds could come from the Capital Improvement Program pool for next year.
“I believe that city officials and schools officials recognize the importance of such a thing,” she said. “We have [free wireless] Downtown, if we are going to make a huge investment like we have with the tablets, we need to continue that investment with wireless access.”
Another point of contention with critics of the initiative is the tablets’ effectiveness in improving test scores.
“There is a lot of debate about that,” said McKee. One program in North Carolina, he said, has seen “fairly dramatic test score increases.”

“I’d love to see that, but I do think that it’s one piece in the whole gamut of what we are doing,” he said. “It’s a piece of the wider puzzle, but I think it’s an important piece.”
Latimer, however, is skeptical.
“The jury is still out on that one,” he said. “I think that better student engagement and better teaching is what leads to higher test scores and better performance.”
One important element of the program––how to evaluate its success–– is still being worked out among board members. McKee said he has been working to build ties with UVA education scholars and is hopeful that a program will be put in place shortly.
Laufer agrees.
“I think pedagogically, we have to make sure that we are evaluating our program to see if it has an effective use in the classroom, but I do believe it’s a great idea,” she said.