Saugus school nets new computers

SAUGUS – When 11 new computers rolled through the door of the Lynnhurst School Monday, Principal Susan Carney said she was beyond excited.The Lynnhurst is just one of five schools receiving new computers after Superintendent Richard Langlois managed to free up some cash within the salary accounts of the current budget.”I’ve been monitoring the salary accounts,” he said. “We have electronic abilities in all the schools but not that access. This will give every school electronic access to our system.”The system means for the first time every school will be networked to the administration building and connected to the district’s student management program. It also means that every classroom will have at least one computer, which bodes well for for a district that Finance Manager Richard Weeks called “digitally starved.”Carney said her school wasn’t starved, but it was weak. The Lynnhurst School actually received a donation of computers from Boston University that put a computer in every classroom, but they were two years old and for many classrooms it was the only computer they had.State standards recommend that districts try to have a four student to one computer ratio for every classroom, but Langlois said his district’s ratio is for the most part higher.Carney said the new computers will also allow her to do something most of the other elementary schools have already taken advantage of – join Study Island, a computer-based study program that has proven very successful in several of the elementary schools.”I can take some of the old computers out of the classrooms and put the new ones in and I can make a mini-computer lab with the older computers,” she said. “So now we can do Study Island like everyone else.”Although students don’t need to be in school because they can access Study Island through home computers, Carney said she has hesitated to join because she knows not all of her students have home computers.”Now I can give them access here,” she said.Carney said she’ll have roughly six computers she can set up in a small room next to her office, which will allow her to bring a few students at a time for computer lab time.”It is beyond exciting,” she said.The Lynnhurst is not the only school benefiting from the computers. The Oaklandvale School will get $4,805 for computers and ancillary hardware, the Veterans School will pick up $13,348.80 for computers and the Waybright School will get a whopping $15,219.46.”They got more because they didn’t have anything,” Carney said.While the high school will also get $10,948.89 for computers, noticeably absent from the list is the Belmonte Middle School.”We made advances at the Belmonte Middle School first,” Langlois said, adding that the sprawling school had almost no technology for students when he came on board.Langlois said he is also looking at grants aimed at getting elementary students Netbooks, which are small durable computer notebooks that were initially designed for third world countries but are now being offered stateside through Dell.”Our goal is to expand (accessibility),” Langlois said. “And the key is that there’s a five-year lifespan for computers.”