Over the past few months, Senate Bill 3044 – which was recently passed by the Mississippi Legislature to initiate the Equity In Distance Learning Act – has provided thousands of Chromebooks to local school districts to further establish distance learning and online services.
The latest local recipient of the computers is the Lamar County School District, which recently received a shipment of 6,500 devices to be distributed throughout all grades in the district.
“Based on the pandemic that we’re going through, and especially during the spring, we all realized that we’ve got to set up that environment, where the kids could learn offsite and onsite,” said Ross Randall, director of technology for the school district. “It became evident that it’s super-important for them to have devices they can use, whether they’re at school or at home, and that they be able to move those back and forth as needed.
“We already had a lot of Chromebooks in the district; most of them were located in the schools in carts, and the teachers just used them during the school day. But we did not issue them to the students and did not let them take them home. But after seeing what happened in the spring – and what’s already happened this year – it’s evident that we really need to be able to offer access to the students to be able to work at home.”
The new Chromebooks will be especially useful in replacing many of the district’s devices that were old and out of date. With the new shipment, every student in the district will have access to the devices, which means every school will have a 1:1 Chromebook-to-student ratio.
“Right now, we do have a Chromebook in almost every student’s hands, but some of them … they work, but they’re just not ideal,” Randall said. “So we’re really anxious to get these in the hands of the kids and swap out those that we need to retire. Within about three weeks, I think we’ll be able to have a good portion of these rolled out.”
Although district officials debated whether kindergarten through second grade students would be allowed to bring the Chromebooks home, it was eventually decided that all grades in the district would be able to bring the devices back and forth from school to home.
“If we have to temporarily close a school, or if a student elects to go home and do distance learning because they maybe have somebody in their household that is high risk, then we’re going to give them a Chromebook to take home,” Randall said. “So K-12, everyone will have one available to take home when needed.”
Randall said many school districts throughout the state will be struggling budget-wise in the next couple of years, in large part because officials do not expect to receive any more funding from the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. That initiative, which is based on student count, helps ensure that every Mississippi student is afforded an educational opportunity regardless of where he or she lives.
“Every district that I’ve talked to, their student count is down, so the next couple of years are going to be slim,” Randall said. “We’re going to be short on budget money, so to be able to have this influx (of Chromebooks) right now, it gets us about two years ahead of schedule.”
The funds from Senate Bill 3044 were handled by the Mississippi Department of Education, which allocated the monies to school districts around the state.
“In my opinion, they did a great job; I don’t see how they did it,” Randall said. “It was almost impossible, because if anybody right now tries to go buy Chromebooks, they’re not going to get them until January or February, because there’s no stock anywhere.
“So the fact that MDE was able to work with the manufacturers and the vendors to secure the stock that we got is amazing. Little Mississippi got a chunk of Chromebooks that the rest of the country is not getting, so it was a pretty good deal for us.”
