MENTONE – Tippecanoe Valley School Corp. is making progress on its 1-to-1 student computer initiative and has a nature trail for public use, the school board heard Monday night. At Monday’s board meeting, Superintendent Brett Boggs had Interim Technology Director Keith Lang give an update on the student computers at Tippecanoe Valley High School. Several parents attended the Sept. 9 board meeting and asked what the hold up was on the high school students getting their Acer tablets. The problem, they were told, was software incompatibility. At the May school board meeting, the board approved for TVHS to be a 1-to-1 school starting with the 2013-14 school year. At a 1-to-1 school, all students have their own tablets for classroom and home use. Tablets may replace some or all textbooks. The school board approved the leasing of 750 Acer tablets for $132,772 per year for four years. Parents will pay $100 in rental fees each school year and will be offered a choice of insurance for the tablets. Parents have already paid for their students’ use of the tablets for the school year but students don’t have them yet. Lang later said he’s been involved with the deployment of the tablets since July. Everything was ready to deploy except the student filter system, which is not compatible with Windows 8 Pro software on the tablets and causes every website to be blocked. In his update to the board last night, Lang said on Sept. 13 he received a mobile patch to fix the filtering problem. He tested it and found no problem. However, when 10 students tested the devices, all the computers failed and students said they had problems getting on the Internet. “We were able to reproduce the problem every time,” Lang said. The problem was taken back to the manufacturer and the software developer identified the problem in their code. This last Friday, Lang said they received another update and they did everything they could to make it crash. Last night and tonight, students are testing the tablets again to try and make them crash. If the student testing goes well, Lang said they could have an install package to fix the problem by the end of this week. Bryan Murphy, board president, asked if there was any word on restitution from the company. “We want to get the problem solved first. Then we’ll talk to the company about the restitution,” Boggs responded. Board member Mark Wise said that since it’s been a “long time” since the start of the school year, there will be some reimbursement to parents. In another matter, Boggs recognized Pike Lumber Company for recently completing the Tippecanoe Valley School Forest Nature Trail. The trail takes visitors through part of the TVSC forest on a path also used for cross country. Along the path, 18 numbered plaques have been posted pointing out different species of trees and plants. The project was coordinated by Pike Lumber Co. Forestland Manager Oliver Grimm and recently completed by Pike intern Rayanna Reffitt. Reffitt is a TVHS graduate and currently a student at Purdue University. Open to the public, the trail is available to teachers and students for educational purposes. “I’ve been told it’s gotten a lot of use lately,” Boggs told the board. Grimm said the trail was a fun project. “Thankfully, Reffitt did most of the heavy lifting,” he said. The nature trail, Grimm noted, is about a half mile long and is well groomed.
