The day after Manteca Unified launched its historic initiative to equip every student from the youngest kindergartner on up with a digital device in January, a mother gratefully approached Superintendent Jason Messer.
In a school where nearly all of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, She couldn’t afford to buy her children computers, the French Camp Elementary School parent told him. Now, a lease option and discounted Internet access enabled her to provide, for $20 a month, all three of her children with the cutting-edge technology. Another girl, Messer recalls, wrote to her teacher, “This is the first email I ever sent!”
Ambitious initiatives such as Manteca’s Going Digital and Stockton Unified’s $114 million Measure E, technology continues to fundamentally reshape the landscape of education. It’s also giving more historically disadvantaged kids something many may have never had had before: a much more level playing field.
“I think it is absolutely a game changer, but more important to me, it’s an equalizer,” Messer said. “Those stories — this was not something they had access to. Those equalizers in our district, that’s what I’m excited about.”
From technological to academic to emotional, health and social supports, school districts are finding that a whole-child approach to education is fast becoming the great equalizer in a rapidly changing, increasingly diverse world. Addressing a students’ holistic needs — Did they eat this morning? Do they speak the language? Are they being abused at home, Do they suffer an allergy or disease that requires the care of a school nurse? — costs less in the long run. Factor in the intangible costs to society of a child who never makes it to graduation and the duty to give every student an equal shot at success becomes all the more imperative.
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