Calcasieu’s public schools have been making technology upgrades to keep up with new state requirements.
Many of the upgrades have been in
preparation for the 2014-15 school year, when all state tests will be
taken online. In the
past few years many local schools have gotten a jump-start by
incorporating iPads for lessons and interactive Promethean Boards
for teaching.
“We’re one of the technological leaders in the state at this point,” District 7 board member Mack Dellafosse said. “We’ve
been upgrading schools each year with more devices, and we’ve gotten more grants.”
According to the state Department of
Education, 54 of 58 schools in Calcasieu Parish meet the 7:1
student-to-computer ratio
set in the Louisiana Believes: Louisiana’s Technology Footprint
standard. This new tool was formed to track and evaluate digital
readiness in schools while also providing ways for educational
facilities to provide the necessary devices and support for
students. Each school’s technological footprint is provided in the
LEA Technology Readiness Assessments for 2014-15.
Pat Deaville, director of high school
curriculum, said among the technological changes made is the increase of
computer labs
and connectivity for the online end-of-course tests. The
graduating class of 2014 will be the first group of students whose
graduation requirement is to pass the EOC and will constitute 20
percent of their grade.
Deaville said the school system has
been working on connectivity time to reduce the number of EOC testing
cycles and to ensure
students do not encounter time-outs during the test. According to
the 2014-15 assessment for Calcasieu Parish, the district
will need a minimum of three gigabytes per second of Internet
bandwidth for the online tests to keep programs from running
slow or timing-out. It shows that Calcasieu Parish has a shared
bandwidth of 155 megabytes per second among the area schools.
“We’ve been doing a lot of reporting back to the state, and I know that we’ve made a very significant gain in increasing our
access to technology for all students,” Deaville said. “We are really working hard to meet these standards, but it’s going
to be a very challenging thing.”
The school system’s chief technology
officer, Sheryl Abshire, said the district will double its bandwidth
around July and
has been working toward updating its system to keep up with new
requirements. Even though it is no longer required to supply
Windows 7 for students — schools can now use the older Windows XP
program — Abshire said adding other technological advancements
can be financially challenging. She said that because the state
Department of Education does not provide technology funding
for schools, the school system has had to use local money and
grants for digital additions.
“This is certainly not a challenge that
the school system will step back from,” she said. “We will make sure we
have the equipment
for students ... so that there are no barriers or roadblocks
because we want them to perform well on these tests.”