WESTBROOK – The Maine Learning Technology Initiative made Maine the first state with a plan to put laptop computers into the hands of all students in grades 7 and up.

What school districts in the area are learning is that holding kids responsible for an expensive electronic device is not always a good idea.

In districts like Westbrook, students are allowed to bring their laptops to and from school. They are carried around like a textbook, often receiving the same treatment, getting tossed around, dropped or spilled on.

Jeff Mao, the state’s learning technology policy director, said a warranty and a buffer pool cover the state-provided laptops. The buffer pool provides a limited number of replacements per district for certain types of damage.

“It’s not an endless well of computers,” Mao said.

The buffer pool has been instrumental for local districts, but is too small for Westbrook, which used up all its buffers last year, according to technology director Tyler Dunphy. He said Westbrook is repairing all its damages locally this year because it has no buffers available.

“While at this point statistically there are less breaks than last year, we have higher costs,” he said.

To make matters worse, Dunphy said, the majority of damages to the district’s laptops are tied to the LCD screen, which is not covered under warranty.

Troubling problem

The school district has roughly 1,200 laptops for students in grades 7 and up through the state learning initiative, Dunphy said.

At the middle school, where the program has been ongoing for eight years, a majority of students has opted into a voluntary protection program that provides insurance in case of damages. However, at the high school, which is in its second year of the program, 371 chose to enroll in the protection program this year and 325 did not, Dunphy said.

It is a given that, with students carrying the computers between classes and to and from home daily, some damages are inevitable. The money collected through the protection plan is intended to take care of damages for those who bought protection, Dunphy said. The district, though, only leased the laptops and must return them to the state when the lease period ends in another year and a half.

“The school department is responsible for ensuring they are in working condition,” he said.

The ultimate responsibility, then, lies with the district. The administration is finding that collecting hundreds of dollars for damages from parents who opted against the protection is not an easy task.

“There’s parents who can’t pay and we have to deal with that,” said Dr. Reza Namin, district superintendent.

While Namin points to the difficulty of collecting for repairs when 52 percent of the district’s students are on free or reduced lunch programs, School Committee Chairman Ed Symbol said an additional problem is that for some, opting against the protection plan was not an economic decision. He suggested one solution is to collect protection plan money from everyone, while making allowances for those facing hardships.

The district’s plan already offers different rates. It normally costs $40, but reduced lunch families may buy in for $30, and the cost is lowered to $20 for free lunch students.

Sue Joyce, a member of the school committee, said she has heard over the years that many families do not agree with allowing students to bring their computers home. Many homes, she said, already have a PC or laptop a child has access to. She said it might make sense to limit which students are allowed to bring computers home.

“So many parents don’t like the program,” she said. “I’ve been hearing complaints year after year.”

The administration has spent more than a month researching potential solutions to this problem. During that time, there were 31 damaged computers not being sent out for repairs, Dunphy said. The district has some spares, but not enough to cover the difference and 15 students were without laptops, sometimes for weeks. Of those, Dunphy said, three were students who opted into the protection plan.

The school committee found no solution to the problem at its Jan. 19 meeting, but did mandate that the computers of students with the protection plan should be fixed right away.

“We owe it to people who paid into the fund to fix their computer and give it back to them,” said school committee member Greg Smith.

According to Dunphy, the computers were sent out for repairs the next day.

Seeking answers

On Jan. 19, the committee discussed, but ultimately opted against, spending roughly $11,000 to insure all computers for the rest of the school year. Some members were not pleased that funds collected through the optional protection plan would be used to buy insurance for everyone.

“That just doesn’t sound right to me,” said Symbol.

Namin also recommended against buying insurance, saying they should stick with a policy adopted in 2007 that established the current system.

“If you didn’t (purchase protection) you’re accountable for it and you’ve got to maintain that accountability,” he said.

Joyce said it is clear the current policy is not working, but added, “It’s really hard to go into something midterm. I don’t think it’s beneficial. It doesn’t make sense.”

“This is something we really need to discuss in more detail before the beginning of next year,” added committee member Jim Violette.

In Gorham, the district has the same policy as Westbrook, according to Dennis Crowe, director of technology. While in theory, the district would bill families not in the protection plan for damages, “getting it is a challenge.”

Gorham, like Westbrook, is prepared to withhold diplomas for those who don’t pay the bill, he said. However, that solution is years away for some students.

Also like Westbrook, Gorham has some issues with how the state rolled out the program. Crowe said one problem is that, starting in October, the state sent out a memo saying it would no longer cover laptops damaged by liquid spills.

“Heaven forbid they tell us what they’re going to do,” he said.

In Westbrook, Symbol said, the state was unhelpful from the beginning. He said the state would have taken technology money from the district if it did not accept the computers and provided no plans for implementing laptops or ideas for handling repairs.

“The problem goes way back to when the program was implemented,” he said.

However, Andrew Wallace, director of technology in South Portland, pointed out that “Maine’s a local control state” and each district can handle the problem as it sees fit. He said the computers are important tools that extend the school day to the home.

“I don’t feel like the state put us out to dry,” he said.

Insurance for all?

The Windham and Raymond school district is one that purchases commercial insurance at a rate of $39,000 annually to cover 3,050 devices in the district, said technology director Robert Hickey.

Hickey said the coverage benefits the district because it shifts liability onto the insurance provider. They no longer have to worry about payment, deductibles, or how to handle screen and spill issues not covered by the warranty or the state buffer.

“We want to be efficient as a school district,” he said. “From the district’s perspective, it’s about a push, a break even.”

Mao said the state does not recommend purchasing commercial insurance because the insurance tends to be more costly than just paying for damages out of the budget.

According to Mao, middle schools are more adept at caring for the computers because the program has been ongoing for so long. High schools are still going through “growing pains,” and the state anticipates a reduction in damages as schools grow more accustomed to the technology, he said.

“It is still a puzzle to be solved at the local level,” he said. “Right now, we feel like things are going reasonably well.”

In Mao’s eyes, the program is too important to ditch over the cost of repairs.

“I just can’t imagine how we could prepare our kids for the modern workforce in the 21st century without having technology all around us,” he said.