Then there is the cost of the wireless networks. Mark Edwards, the superintendent in Henrico County, said he had already found that some school walls were so thick that he would need to double the number of AirPorts, which are Apple's wireless devices for delivering broadband Internet access.
Even Jerry Crystal, technology coordinator for the Bloomfield district who directed the laptop program, said he worried that the costs might start to look unreasonable in the eyes of administrators facing tight budgets.
He has wondered, he said, whether the school could still increase student achievement by pursuing a far-cheaper approach using laptops that are distributed daily to limited numbers of students and pushed from classroom to classroom on carts with wireless access. And he is conducting an intense evaluation of the Carmen Arace Middle School to determine exactly what students are getting in return for those US$500,000 checks the school board has written each year.
It is an attempt, Crystal said, to answer a question that has hounded him since the laptop program started: "Are we getting US$500,000 of improvement out of these kids?"
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