Technology: Some Background

I am always amused whenever we announce something significant that I will have to tamp down rumors about the change for the next couple of weeks. In the Crusader newsletter we announced that beginning next fall, all incoming freshmen students would receive a computer as part of their education at Faith. This week I took a phone call from a parent who had heard we would be eliminating textbooks as part of this program. Not true.



While I am no fan of textbooks (I think they can get in the way of teachers teaching good lessons and students taking responsibility for their own learning) at least in the near term, textbooks will continue to play a role in a Faith education. We will have discussions over the next several years about reducing our reliance on textbooks, we are not there yet. We will promote a move to electronic versions of texts whenever we can.



Over the next few months parents will get more information about what moving to one-to-one will mean for students at Faith, but I do need to immediately talk about some of the thinking that went into the way we are starting the process. The most negative feedback we have received to date has been from the parents of this year's freshmen and I guess that's understandable.

In almost any major decision we make there are competing and often contradictory interests. Throughout the last decade Faith has made an effort to build an excellent school. That has been most evident in the construction and physical improvements that have been appeared: 1st a gym, then student center and now the CPAC. While we have reached the end of a building phase, our school cannot stop improving. Excellence is a journey, not a destination. In these difficult economic times we faced troubling choice: minimize or reduce tuition and further delay implementation of our long-standing goal or begin the process of one-to-one while remaining cognizant of the impact on our families. We chose the latter. But we were mindful of the financial impact this program would have, so our roll out will be slower than we would like. I could not justify to the Board a 6-7% increase in tuition to buy the 400 computers necessary to begin with both 9th and 10th graders.

We didn't start with seniors because they would only be here for one year and many take a reduced load. That would not yield the biggest impact for our precious dollars. Now you can certainly make an argument that your tuition dollars will be paying for computers that your student will never see. The reality is that your tuition dollars pay for the school program. That may include a number of programs that your student never experiences or enjoys. Your tuition dollars support basketball teams, school newspapers, AP Studio Art and the paintball club. You may not have a student in any of them. Moreover, your tuition dollars still support technology. In fact, since the freshmen will have their own computers, our ratio of computers to students is dropping, making it more likely your student will have direct access to one of our existing laptops. Perhaps most importantly, your tuition dollars are supporting additional training that all our teachers have received over the last couple of years to equip them to be more effective users of classroom technology. That will continue to improve the education of all our students.

There is more to be said on this, but the Crusaders are in action tonight!