By Robinson Duffy, Fairbanks News-Miner

The sixth-graders at North Pole Middle School, like most of the students in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District, have to bring pencils, notepads and textbooks to school each day. But the 60 or so sixth-graders at North Pole Middle will now have a slightly more expensive piece of hardware in their backpacks.

Last week, each of the North Pole sixth-graders was given a $1,193.37 Apple MacBook laptop computer to use during class and for homework.

“It’s been my dream as a teacher that every child in my classroom would have access to a computer,” said Jeff Jacobson, one of the two sixth-grade teachers at the middle school. “Now that dream has come true.”

In the classroom, the computers will become an integral part of the students’ days, Jacobson said. With the laptops on their desks, the students will have instant access to the Internet thanks to a new high-speed wireless network installed in the school.

The computers came loaded with a suite of software applications to help the students with their schoolwork, said Jim Cobb, the district’s executive director of technology. The software includes a program to help them organize their notes and another one to help them search the Internet more efficiently.

Jacobson said the students in his class have already used their computers to make a slide show of digital photographs and to type English assignments. He plans on having his students use the computers to create research projects complete with digital images and videos. He said he and fellow sixth-grade teacher, Terry Solomon, are excited to find new ways to implement the computers into their regular lesson plans.

“We see the power of the technology to deliver the curriculum,” he said.

The laptops are free for the students, who will get to keep the computers until at least the end of their eighth-grade year, thanks to a grant from the Alaska Association of School Boards Consortium for Digital Learning, which is picking up two-thirds of the initial costs for the basic laptops. That help means the Fairbanks school district will have to pay $174,527 for the program, including maintenance of and insurance for the computers, installation of new network hardware in the school and teacher training.

North Pole Middle School is one of 48 schools in Alaska participating in Apple’s One-to-One Digital Initiative. It is the only school in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District to be included in the program. Cobb, earlier this year, said that one of the reasons North Pole Middle was chosen as the pilot school for the program was because the district’s administration wanted to give the school a “shot in the arm.”

“It’s a psychological boost to a school that had a problem last year, helping the school and the community put it behind them,” Cobb said, referring to an incident last year in which several students were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill other students and staff.

“This is going to be a fun year for these kids,” Cobb said on Thursday night after a meeting where parents and sixth-graders learned the nuts and bolts of the program before the students were allowed to take their laptops home for the first time.

The contract parents and students had to sign before being able to take the laptops home states that since the laptops are the school district’s property, there shouldn’t be any expectation of privacy.

While in the school, the laptops will communicate with a computer server through the wireless network, Cobb said. All of the students’ work will be automatically uploaded to the server every 20 minutes so that there will be a backup in case of any problems with the laptops.

This also mean, Cobb said, that the school will be able to monitor everything the students do with the computers. At any time during the school day, a teacher or administrator can use their computer to see what is on the screen of a student’s laptop at that moment.

The first thing in the morning each school day, the laptops will tell the school’s server exactly what the students did with their computers at home.

“So we will know what you do,” Cobb told the students.

All of the teachers at North Pole Middle were also given laptops as part of this program and all of the classrooms and common areas of the school were set up with wireless networks.

“We’ve geared up for what I hope will happen,” Cobb said.

What he hopes will happen, he said, is that in the next few years enough money will be found in the school district’s budget or from special appropriations from the Legislature to give every student at North Pole Middle a free laptop. But he doesn’t want to stop there.

“We’re looking at the requirements to make this a reality across the district,” he said.

But before that can happen, he said, there has to be a shift in the way administrators and government officials think about technology funding. Right now many policy makers consider technology an optional expense, he said, but in the modern world it should be an essential element of education.

“We need to treat technology like we treat heating oil or electricity. It should be a staple that’s built into the budget,” Cobb said.

Bob Whicker, a representative from Apple Computers overseeing the One-to-One Digital Initiative in Alaska, said the company’s research has shown that having laptops in the classroom has helped raise students’ tests scores and improve productivity. It also helps them with their communication skills, he said.

“The students write more and they write more effectively,” he said. “That’s what this is all about. It’s not about the laptops, it’s about teaching and education.”

Sue Hull, one of the school board members who worked to get the laptop program here in Fairbanks, warned the students and administrators, however, of thinking the computers are going to be a magic wand.

“Technology doesn’t make changes, it just enables it,” she said. “Just having a laptop isn’t going to raise your test scores. It’s only if you say, ‘I want to make the most of this.’”

Whether or not test scores go up at North Pole Middle School remains to be seen, and it is something the district will be watching very closely, Cobb said, but the students’ spirits on Thursday night were certainly high as the laptops were handed out.

“Oh, yeah. I’m excited,” was all 11-year-old Haley Brunnell could say as she showed her parents her new computer.