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Group offers M. Park students laptops

By DANIEL GILBERT
dgilbert@potomacnews.com
Thursday, February 23, 2006



Sixty Hispanic students from Manassas Park have entered into a special deal to get laptops valued at $2,400 each. The seller, however, is hoping to collect in a different currency: learning dollars.

The program, called “Laptops for Learning Dollars,” is a joint project between the Hispanic Youth Foundation and George Mason University, which studies how Hispanic students respond to incentives to improve academically. Last May, HYF donated 60 state-of-the-art IBM laptops to both Manassas Park and Arlington schools. After getting the computers, students and their parents signed a contract to pay them off in monthly installments of learning dollars over a two-year period.

There are three main ways to earn learning dollars: letter grades, student behavior and parental involvement. The academic component is based on grades in math, science and English, as well as student attendance, homework completion and class participation. Additionally, students can rack up dollars when their parents attend school activities.

To make payments, each student receives a special bank account - managed by GMU - and a learning dollar checkbook. If students fall behind in making payments, they are charged a late fee. If they fall too far behind, they have to surrender the laptop.

The laptops have a three-year guarantee for any problem that is not “intentional destruction.”

Raul Almeida, who founded HYF in 1997, said he took the laptop idea from a pilot program in Fairfax, where computers were lent to students.

“It’s not good to give things for free, one must earn them,” Almeida said. He founded HYF out of a concern that Hispanic students were not finishing high school and moving on to college. Last year, just 40 percent of high school seniors in Manassas Park reported plans to attend a four-year college, down from 73 percent in 2000-01.

Almeida does not stipulate that all laptops be given to Hispanic students but allows the school system to determine which students receive them.

All the computers in Manassas Park have been distributed to Hispanic students, according to Gail Pope, associate superintendent for Manassas Park.

“Since it was the Hispanic Youth Foundation that came to us, we focused on Hispanic students who we knew did not have computers,” she said.

Pope said that the computers were roughly evenly split between elementary, middle and high school levels.

Jack Levy, the program’s new director, said that there was “no lack of school districts” interested in participating. Ultimately, Manassas Park and Arlington were chosen for their “large Hispanic populations,” and their eagerness to implement the program. Thirty-eight percent of Manassas Park’s 2,358 students are Hispanic, while that figure is 29 percent of Arlington’s 18,231 students.

When asked why the same amount of computers was given to Arlington - a bigger school system - as to Manassas Park, Levy said that Arlington was “not that big.”

In Arlington, all the laptops have gone to one school, Gunston Middle School. While more than half of the students receiving laptops are Hispanic, the emphasis has been on those who are economically disadvantaged, according to Bob Smith, Arlington superintendent.

Smith said that each student who received a laptop qualified for “free and reduced lunch” under No Child Left Behind. Gunston was chosen for practical considerations: a project with Comcast several years ago provided lower-income families of Gunston students with broadband Internet connections; the laptops “seemed like the perfect addition,” Smith said.

Speaking at Manassas Park Elementary on Feb. 21, Levy and Almeida gave a presentation in Spanish to a group of 50 parents and students. Few audience members had questions, but one major concern surfaced: Many of the parents did not speak English, or know how to navigate the Internet. They were wary of their children having access to something they themselves did not understand.

Veronica Miller, Hispanic liaison for Manassas Park, warned the parents of such Web sites such as MySpace, Xanga and Friendster as sites students “should not get into.” Miller also said that there will be further meetings to educate parents about the Internet.

The laptop program may help with another problem that has plagued Manassas Park schools in recent years: transience. Pope said that it is not unusual for class size to vary significantly from one year to another.

By placing a computer in their homes, students and parents have the opportunity to be both materially and virtually connected to a school.