Phillip Akerman’s single biggest worry as he walked into the new high school just over a month ago was what was going happen to all of his friends?

After a year at Salem High School, Akerman said he wasn’t the only one worried about giving up friendships forged in the neighboring community during freshman year.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to fret for too long.

“I’m friends with almost everybody,” the sophomore said last week, looking up from his school-provided Macbook during a study period.

But there were other challenges in getting used to a new building, new classmates and teachers, he said. The block scheduling has been difficult to get comfortable with and it took a few days to learn the layout of the building, but Akerman rated it a step up from Salem High even if the academic standards were tougher.

Classmate Colby Putnam agreed, describing Windham High as brighter, greener and more technology-orientated than any other school he could name.

“We have all this new technology, and we’re learning in a different way,” he said, pointing to a digital whiteboard taking up the space that a blackboard would have in the past.

“It’s a new and cool system that other schools don’t have.”

Technology – and how students and teachers would adjust – topped a list of concerns school administrators and district officials had over the summer. After getting into the rhythm of the school year, Principal Richard Manley said his main fear was students possibly mishandling their new laptops and teachers struggling to adapt to the technology at their fingertips.

“The students took to that more quickly than we were preparing,” he said. “Although we put a lot of time in planning and preparing for it and are continuing to do it, (the year has) actually has gone off pretty smoothly and some of the things that we thought may have come up didn’t.”

It’s been a learning experience for faculty and students, said humanities teacher Loren Dow. If she has a problem running a computer program, Dow will more than likely work it out with help from her students.

“Overall, things went smoothly. We are all starting to learning along with the kids,” Dow said. “It does take a lot of patience, but there is the fact that we are all in this together.”

The only downside to technology? With classes available by podcast and homework assignments downloadable, there’s no excuse for missing work, Putnam said.

As for the friends Putnam left behind at Salem High, there were no worries for him there.

“It was tough to leave everybody I became friends with, but it’s school,” the 15-year-old said. “You can always hang out afterward.”