Districts Place High Priority on 1-to-1 Computing

Putting a computing device in the hands of every student requires a willingness to take risks and an understanding of what has worked in the past

By Amanda M. Fairbanks

Peter Sanchioni likes to joke that he has five years to prove the 1-to-1 laptop program his district recently put in place is a resounding success. Either that, or he's out of a job.

Sanchioni is the superintendent of the Natick public school system, a solidly middle-class district of about 5,000 students in Massachusetts. He first started looking into 1-to-1 programs, in which each student is paired with a school-issued laptop or tablet computer, a few years back.

At the time, the district was home to an antiquated high school that was barely equipped to provide Internet access to its teachers, let alone to stream content simultaneously on thousands of devices. But when the construction of Natick's new high school came in significantly under budget, the school board voted to spend the extra money on 1,500 MacBook laptops—first for the 8th grade class, then for the entire high school during the program's second year of implementation, at a total...