Healy, AK — In a school district that boasts an experimental, wireless-enabled school bus of its own, you’d expect a fairly creative learning model. In Alaska’s Denali Borough School District, you’d be right. Equally creative was the leasing program that has made the district’s new 1 to 1 laptop initiative possible. With the help of a strong collaborative effort between Apple Financial Services (AFS) Education Finance and Denali, all high school students (and their teachers) in the district now have their own PowerBook G4 computers. As a result, everyone is now “on board” with the new project-based learning model.

Denali Borough schools have long been on the cutting edge of technology. With fully equipped, iMac computer labs and an iBook Wireless Mobile Lab, students at Tri-Valley, Anderson, and Cantwell schools have had the benefits of computer-assisted learning for years. But, says Denali Borough Superintendent Bob Whicker, his team and the Denali school board came to understand that merely placing computers in the classroom was not enough. Each child needed unlimited access to technology.

“We know that traditional computer labs don’t always work, in terms of integrating technology throughout the curriculum,” Whicker notes. “Depending on a teacher’s view of technology, some use the computers a lot, some not at all. At best, students might get to use the systems a half-hour to an hour a day. We realized that if computer usage was truly going to become as common as using a pencil or paper, we’d have to give our kids 24/7 access.”

A Creative Solution with AFS Education Finance
Unfortunately, the Denali district’s budget wasn’t as big as its administrators’ vision. Faced with declining enrollments, and the prospect of decreased state funding, Whicker had to get creative. AFS Education Finance provided the solution.

“We told our board that we’d use grant funds only for the purchase of equipment,” recalls Whicker. “Thanks to the openness of AFS Education Finance to work with us, we were able to take some of our entitlement funds (Title II, Title V, Carl Perkins, and others) along with some equipment funds from a construction project, and enter into a lease-purchase arrangement with Apple. Under that plan we acquired approximately 175 PowerBook G4 laptops — the 12-inch display models for the students, and the 15-inch display notebooks for the teachers. The initial numbers showed that we’d actually spend less with the Apple lease than in the previous three years while getting more technology than we’d hoped for per year ... so for us, it just made sense.”

Integrating New Technology Tools
All of Denali’s teachers received their PowerBook G4 laptops in the spring of 2003, along with several days of training provided by three members of the Apple Professional Development team. The teachers were encouraged to work with their new notebooks throughout the summer, making sure they’d be comfortable with the laptops by the time their students received their own PowerBook G4 computers in September.