Concerns raised by some residents have education officials defending a proposal to put laptops in the hands of students in Windham’s new high school.

Longtime resident Tom Case said he worried that students would be unable to properly care for the equipment, though he is not fully opposed to the plan.

“Kids can break things; they lose their iPods, they lose their phones. My main reservation is them carrying (the laptops) back and forth every day,” Case said. “At the end of the school year, there is probably a hundred pounds of clothes that kids have forgotten.”

According to Assistant Superintendent Roxanne Wilson, the research administrators have looked at indicates that students will most likely develop a sense of ownership for the laptops, making them less inclined to damage the computers. Though the district is considering insuring the computers, Wilson said concerns over potential damage to the equipment was one of the reasons why officials had selected an Apple laptop for the program.

“They manufacture a laptop for student use that is very rigorous. It’s put through the paces and they tend not to have the damage or the breakage that you might find in some of the other laptops,” Wilson said. “(The students will) own these machines.

They are going to take care of the machines. (Damage) will occur, but we are still developing our policies and procedures on what we will do and how we’re going to take care of that.”

Case has also questioned the timing of the program. He believes the district should have waited until after the school’s faculty had been hired, but Wilson said that with the new high school ready to open, the time to implement the one-to-one computing is now.

“We’re building a new school, and this is the time to put any extra infrastructure in. One of the biggest reasons other schools don’t do it is because they can’t afford to retrofit their existing school,” Wilson said. “We also know that five or 10 years down the road, this will be commonplace in schools.”

If the program is put into place, Windham will be the first community in the state to replace traditional computer labs with individual laptops.

Officials estimate that the program will cost $642,157 in its first year – with the funding expected to come out of the high school’s building budget – roughly $180,000 less than starting with traditional computer labs and classroom workstations.

That number is lower due to the high school only being open to a freshman and sophomore class in its inaugural year.

Despite the early savings, the cost is expected to rise to $1,142,566 by the third year of the program – $229,703 a year more than the traditional model – as new computers are purchased for incoming classes.

Despite the concerns surrounding the program, Wilson said that the focus for administrators was not on giving students laptops, but on preparing them to use the computers as real-world tools for research, presentations and collaboration.

“It’s an instructional way of meeting the kids’ needs in a very meaningful way and using the tools that 21st-century kids are going to use. It’s not about the laptops, it’s about how we’re using them to teach the kids,” Wilson said. “It’s not necessarily about how they have to go home and use (the laptops) for homework, they’re using the laptops as a tool in the classroom.”