“This school year Hixson [Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis] became one of the first public schools in the region to provide students with laptops to use at school and at home,” Carolyn Bower reports for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The school has equipped nearly 100 seventh-graders with the personal computers. That’s about a third of the seventh-grade class. The other students have access to three computer labs as well as some shared laptops.”

“Mary Stefanus, Hixson’s principal, said she hopes to expand the pilot program some day to include every student in the school… She toured public schools in Indianapolis that issue each student a laptop. She learned about Chaminade and Christian Brothers College high school – two private Catholic high schools that lease wireless IBM laptops to students. She heard about Villa Duchesne, which sold an HP Compaq Tablet PC 1000 to each of 150 ninth- and 10th-graders this fall. Using building and district money, Stefanus decided to spend $61,000 a year for three years to lease 125 Apple iBooks for Hixson students and teachers,” Bower reports.

Full article here.