What is the plan?

Right now, today, only a handful of students have our laptops – about 38 kids in Immokalee, who attend three different schools, and four more at Lake Park Elementary School in Naples. Jane, our head teacher, is working with the four children at Lake Park. The kids in Immokalee completed their initial program last summer. We are not currently working with them, but we plan to again, hopefully before next summer.

Here is the plan:

We will buy and distribute more 100 laptops this spring. We intend to give these computers to the classmates of the children we have already worked with in Immokalee and at Lake Park. That way, if they choose to, their teachers can utilize the laptops in the classroom.

That is our short-term goal. We chose 100 because it is the minimum order we can place with the manufacturer, One Laptop Per Child.

Long term? We are not going to get ahead of ourselves and announce to the world that we intend to buy tens of thousands of laptop computers for all of the poor children of South Florida. We’ll get there, but one step at a time. We figure after we raise funds for the first 100, we’ll get to work on the second 100. We can talk about thousands later.

But having said that, let me share what is happening in other parts of the country and the world:

* For the past 10 years, every last public school child in the state of Maine has been given his or her own laptop computer – not OLPC computers, mind you, so they’re actually paying more than we will have to for our kids. They are not using our curriculum, but regardless, we will be studying their results in-depth in the future to see what we can learn from their program.

* 17,000 public school kids in Birmingham, Alabama all have of will soon possess OLPC laptops. They actually got started this fall, after we had already completed our ground-breaking pilot in Immokalee. Again, what curriculum they are using and what early results they’ve had will be interesting for us to study.

* Several countries around the world are buying OLPC computers in the hundreds of thousands. Mexico is one such country, as are Brazil and Peru.

My point in all this is merely that our goals aren’t lofty or unattainable at all. All we hope to do for the children of South Florida is emulate what is already being accomplished for the children of Maine, Birmingham, and Mexico.

…Although we are taking it to the next level with our unique curriculum, which helps the children master technology in ways that these other school systems have not begun to do. But we’ll get to that in a later entry.