Excerpt from The Advocate
BY CHARLES LUSSIER | [email protected]
July 5, 2016; 8:44 p.m.
 
When summer break ends, Baton Rouge public school students in grades five to eight will have a gift waiting for them: an 11-inch Chromebook.
 
The East Baton Rouge Parish school system is spending $3.5 million to buy 12,805 of the $200 laptops. That’s enough for 10,000-plus students, hundreds of teachers and hundreds of spares. The plan is to expand a grade at a time, starting next year with ninth grade. Meanwhile, computers no longer needed are being moved to bolster technology in third and fourth grades.
 
An assembly line of school technology staff is spending their summer unboxing and readying these computers at a rate of about 750 a day. The goal is to have them all ready for the start of the school year Aug. 10. The school system also is using its federal e-rate money to expand wireless internet to every school and is on track to finish by December.

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