Parents will be asked to pay $18 to $20 for high school students to get portable flash drives as part of a new technology plan for Cape Elizabeth High School unanimously adopted by the School Board last week.

The purchase is not mandatory, but is expected to help students transfer work between school computers and those at home. District Technology Coordinator Gary Lanoie said the flash drives are just one of several options students will have to save their work; they also have the option of saving their work to a school-wide network or e-mailing their work home.

The plan is an alternative to the original desire of the School Board to eventually provide an individual laptop to every student at the high school. When the board could not find $58,500 in next year’s budget to extend the one-to-one laptop initiative into tenth grade the search began for alternatives.

Interim Superintendent Bob Lyman said the “Plan B” was not his or anybody’s preferred plan. Everybody would rather extend the one-to-one initiative into tenth grade, he said. But, “I don’t believe we can do that at this point.”

“Plan B” would take the 165 laptops already owned by the high school, including those originally intended for individual use by ninth graders, and redistribute them onto mobile carts built by the school’s maintenance department.

Each academic department – special education, English, social studies, math, health/PE/art and foreign language – will have a mobile cart with 24 laptops each. The science department, which already has a mobile computer lab of 12 laptops, would get an additional cart with 12 laptops. The sciences classes are in a special situation, Lanoie said, because they work in pairs with the laptops for experiments. So, there would be two mobile labs available to teachers.

These mobile labs would allow teachers within each department to sign out the cart for a particular period and wheel it into a classroom.

“This plan will continue and expand the best use of the technology investment made by the town and CEEF this past year,” Lanoie said.

The plan will cost a total of $26,527, most of which – $21,327 – will pay for the purchase of 21 additional laptops for staff members. Lanoie said about half the staff at the high school received laptops this year and providing laptops to the remaining staff next year would mean that all teachers would have the same tools that are on the mobile labs.

Lanoie said there will be no additional cost to the schools because of a $25,000 grant from the Cape Elizabeth Education Foundation and the rearrangement of some things within the budget – such as the purchase of three laptops instead of three data projectors. Stipends for teachers who take care of the mobile computer labs were also struck from the original draft because some School Board members thought they were unnecessary.

The grant from CEEF allowed the number of laptops on each cart to be raised from 20 to 24, a better setup according to High School Principal Jeff Shedd.

“There’s only a tiny number of classes with more than 24 students,” he said.

The plan also provides 10 laptops to be available in the library for students to sign out and take home. According to Lyman, 94 percent of students in Cape Elizabeth have access to computers at home. He said that figure came from answers 11th graders gave on last year’s MEAs that asked them about access to computers at home.

The original intention of the one-to-one laptop initiative was to make a laptop available to each student, so they could use it in the classroom and bring it home for homework and research. The new plan will not allow every student to have their own laptop to take home, but portable flash drives will make it possible for students to save and transfer data from computers at the school to their home computer.

The portable flash drives, which are the size of a pack of gum, will be available for the students and their families to purchase at cost and are compatible with both Macs and PCs.

The board discussed whether the flash drives should be provided free-of-charge by the school, but in the end they decided making the families purchase the flash drives would be acceptable and probably prevent them from being taken for granted. Lyman has previously said the schools can ask families to pay for the drives, as long as the purchase is not a requirement.