BAY MINETTE, Ala. — Baldwin County Board of Education has implemented a program, with the help of a $2-million grant, to provide laptop computers to all students and teachers at Baldwin County High School.

Baldwin County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Alan Lee visited the school Wednesday to explain the effort that he hopes will branch out to all of Baldwin County, reaching students and teachers in grades four through 12.

“We are at the education stage and are preparing people to take this on,” he said. “We will be training teachers this summer during some professional development days. The teachers will get their laptops this summer and the students will get theirs in the fall.”

Lee said the current cost of the laptops is $1.5 million, but he hopes to reduce future costs by leasing computers instead of buying them, which would cost $200 per student per year.

The superintendent explained that he has hoped to implement a program such as this for quite some time, but waited until success was proven elsewhere.

“I'm a bit of a skeptic, myself,” Lee said. “When we visited a school in Mooresville, N.C., we saw (due to a similar effort) a decrease in behavior referrals, a decrease in the drop-out rate, an increase in graduations and an increase in test scores from the 60 percentile to the 90 percentile. They moved up to the number one or number two school in North Carolina within three years.”

Lee believes that benefits will flourish.

“It’s the power it gives teachers to change the manor with which they instruct and the power it gives students to learn at their own pace,” he said.

Lee explained that since students within one classroom can be at widely-varying levels, computers will give options for a range of approaches instead of teachers being forced to chose which level to teach.

“We needed a difference in how we approach instruction, and Mooresville is a model,” he said.

The superintendent also noted that teachers would lighten their physical loads by being able to carry laptops home instead of toting boxes of books and papers.

BCHS 10th grader Buzz Cabaniss said he is also happy about the lighter load.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “We’ll be able to email teachers our homework and won’t have to carry books home. You can write essays on the computer and have it with you and do Power Points.”

Other options for computer work at school are difficult, according to Cabaniss.

“We have a lab with 30 student computers, and our teacher has to reserve it before another teacher does,” he said. “It’s a first-come, first-served basis.”