Charlotte Schools Seeks to Spend Salary Money on iPads

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (NC) are using 40% of increased county funding awarded to avert teacher layoffs to provide iPads to teachers and classrooms.

Last year Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools galvanized local support in a campaign to ask for additional funding to avert teacher layoffs. They gained an additional $26 million. This year CMS is spending $10 million on iPads for the classroom.

CMS notified employees this week that the district is taking applications from teams of teachers with proposals for using the tablets to “meet the needs of the 21st century digital learner.” Groups that are chosen will get one iPad per teacher and up to 10 per classroom for student use, along with accessories, training and tech support.

The $10 million in county money to be spent on the teacher technology grants is in addition to $1.2m already spent on iPads for school administrators. This comes as something of a shock to people doing napkin math and working out that the money could instead have been spent on over 300 full time teachers to reduce class sizes and improve basic fundamental education.

CMS defends the expenditure as being a one-off investment in technology:

Eric Davis, who chaired the school board last year, said CMS leaders “did precisely what we said we were going to do.” They prepared based on the best available forecasts, he said, then adjusted based on what CMS actually got from county, state and federal governments.
“We were making investments in the district last year, and technology is a clear area where we need to make investments,” Davis said.

The benefits of iPad use in the classroom were studied this semester at Weber State University. Conclusions to the study are as yet unavailable, but early reports indicate mixed results:

The students in the courses that provided the iPads responded positively to using the tablets. However, many students had trouble adjusting to the technology, and others found it was not as convenient as they had hoped. The tablets have proven to be helpful in some areas with drawbacks in others.

Comments

tired teacher

March 14, 2012 at 10:54 am

good thing they asked the teachers before they invested such a huge amount of money in the program.

obviously they wouldn’t have any idea about programs that might help. but apple, apple knows how to help kids learn

Reply
- Joe
  
  March 15, 2012 at 9:19 am
  
  I like their ipad textbook ideas but the priorities of this program seem..off.
  
  Reply
tired teacher

March 15, 2012 at 8:13 pm

the real problem with the ipad thing is replacing the ipads, it costs too much and happens to frequently (kids aren’t notorious for being gentle with things)

Reply
- Kevin
  
  March 18, 2012 at 2:30 pm
  
  The problem with the ipad thing is that they cost a ton of money and provide no tengible benefit at present. I am as gung ho about technology in the classroom as anyway, but has anyone actually come up with a good way to use it to improve the educational outcomes yet?
  
  Reply
Joe

March 20, 2012 at 7:44 am

Is this some kind of a disease that hit several school districts at once? There’s now a second story on yet another school system that spent money on ipads and now can’t pay the bills. This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

Reply
PTA Assaulting School Choice in South Carolina | RedState

March 25, 2012 at 4:48 pm

[...] inner city schools receive $12,000 per child. With that money, the schools decided to spend $10 million to buy iPads for their classrooms; after spending $1.2 million to purchase iPads for [...]

Reply