Arlington County is one of the largest counties in Virginia in terms of population. In a nice win for Apple, the school board announced that every single student in the county will be receiving a brand new MacBook Air. The rollout will start this year, with laptops provided to all 9th graders.
As it turns out, 9th grade is when the Computer Science track starts in Arlington, a good year to make sure that every student has equal access to the technology required to learn programming. The current curriculum is based on older Windows machines.
Not just one of the largest but one of the wealthiest counties in VA, topped by Falls Church, Fairfax, and Loudoun. If this works out, expect the others to match the effort.
And, sort of corresponding to the wealth, one of the highest educated per capita in terms of secondary and post-grad education… and one of the highest per-capita spending on students in the region.
Back when I lived there during middle school we had two carts of the frosted iBook G3s for the entire school… things have certainly changed!
Must be nice to have proper funding for a public school system.
This is still a much better solution than tablet computing.However, a large portion of American school districts can’t afford this kind of deployment.
Here in Wisconsin, we’re still firing teachers so neocons will have no taxes to pay.
Sounds way too familiar.
As a student of Fairfax County (right near Arlington), I can say that this should already be in place. Especially at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. We are all required to take Computer Science and the computers for doing so are pretty bad.
I live in Arlington and I am blown away. Around 9 years ago I was involved in trying to keep Macs in the schools, they decided to remove Macs from the elementary schools and they had very little presence in middle and high schools. IT struck me as very anti-Apple, stating that Dell service was much better than Apple (could have been true) but employees told me that top IT people made sure that Apple had no chance and they did not allow for any dissent in the ranks. 2 years ago high school teachers for the first time had the option of having a Mac or a PC. So for my school district to adopt the MacBook Air to this degree stuns me. Too late for my son, he is a senior in high school. This shows a big change in how Apple products are viewed. Perhaps also shows an improvement in Apple K-12 support and sales.