When Oakland Junior High introduced the one-to-one idea, which gave a laptop to every student for the course of three years, it was the inspiration for many schools to begin providing internet devices for their students to use long-term outside of the school building.  Since then, Stillwater Area School District has noticed the internet devices in many of their classrooms are ill distributed and out of date.

With the realization of the need for new technology something else was discovered as well.  Many of the books in elementary school classrooms had been provided for students by teachers themselves. This was a problem to Ryan Laager, Executive Director of Curriculum and Secondary Education, and he presented ideas to the school board about ways to fix these significant issues.

“There was a need that came to our attention that many of our elementary schools had a real deficiency in the area of technology.  There were some cases where computers that were 10 years old were still trying to be used, some schools had zero portable devices available to all of the students.  So, we had a huge issue with technology.  We also had a lot of elementary classrooms where the books were being purchased by teachers with money straight out of their pocket and from a district standpoint it’s important that we provide those materials,” said Laager.

Many issues contributed to the problems at hand and Laager and the school board are doing their best to address the problems at hand to better a student’s learning environment and experience.

Laager said, “We’re making sure to purchase books that classrooms, teachers and students actually need, and not just giving them materials that they already have.  For the technology part of it, there are so many districts right now that are one to one with student and portable devices.  We have some schools where students may not even use a computer in a month.  The internet is an unlimited source for information and that would be a learning resource that kids wouldn’t have without devices.”

The school board and Laager hope to provide these solutions to the schools with the biggest need in March and schools with the next level need in Fall of 2014.  The solutions include purchasing books for elementary school classrooms and beginning to update technologies available to students of all ages in schools in the Stillwater Area School District.  Laager hopes that a plan can be worked out for 7-12 students to be able to lease a device that is a tablet or larger to take home for at least one school year.  This would provide students with an up to date device that can be used for school work outside of the classroom.