Department of education gives Manassas Park $96,000 for school tablets

Seven hundred 9th and 10th grade students in Manassas Parks schools will now have access to an electronic tablet device for their schoolwork, as part of a partnership between the Virginia Department of Education and the school system.

“The program is being funded in part by the Virginia Department of Education – it’s an e-learning initiative grant that we applied for and received,” said Jennifer Braswell-Geller, Director of Special Programs for the Manassas Park school system.

The funding from the state is a matching grant, with 80% of the cost being covered by the department of education and the remaining 20% being locally matched by the school board.

The Virginia Department of Education awarded the school system $96,000 for the project, and Manassas Park funded just under $20,000 towards the overall cost, according to Braswell-Geller.

Before handing out the devices to the students, the school system went through a an extensive criteria process and a pilot program at the beginning of the school year. They ended up selecting the Dell Venue 11 Pro HD Windows tablet.

“For this entire school year, our instructional technology specialist has been regularly meeting, so we can get their feedback. And ultimately their feedback has helped drive our future decisions, in terms of moving this initiative forward,” said Braswell-Geller.

In terms of criteria, the schools wanted devices that had good battery life, fast processing speeds, quality screen resolution, durability and a lightweight.

The grant program had a cap of $400 per device, but according to Braswell-Geller, the school board helped to fund the additional cost for the Dell tablets.

“Our school board was very supportive in us finding the right device for our students, and a good quality device that would help enhance the learning and instruction in our classrooms. Our position wasn’t ‘find something cheap and get it in the kid’s hands’ – we really took a lot of time to evaluate and plan,” said Braswell-Geller.

The school system has already begun handing out the devices to the students in large deployments. While right now, only the two-grade levels are receiving the devices, there has been talk of expanding the program to eleventh and twelfth graders as well, according to program documents.

Braswell-Geller stated that the teachers and administrators have already seen collaboration between students using the devices, and over time they’ll be able to see more benefits.

“Whseen something like this [program] starts, it takes a little while for everyone to see that end result everyone’s looking for…but what we’ve already seen and what we knew would happen would be a high level of collaboration between students, and students and teachers,” Braswell-Geller said, continuing, “We know that this generation of kids, they’ve grown up with devices – this is how they learn, how they navigate their lives – so it shouldn’t be any different in school…but what we do see is greater ownership and flexibility with students.”