BY JONATHAN CANNON

HERALD DEMOCRAT

BONHAM --In a few months Bonham High School students will find their backpacks a lot lighter. There will be no biology or algebra textbooks, perhaps no weighty copy of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" and no crumpled notes on the Civil War that have sunk to the bottom of the bag.

When students get ready to take notes or read a chapter of their chemistry homework, they'll reach into their bag and pull out a small computer.

This future, one with a single computer for each student, is thanks to the $840,000 Texas Education Agency grant the district recently won.

"I think it'll be another tool in the tool bag" for improving learning, Bonham school Superintendent Sonny Cruse said.

"It's a tool you're giving to every student," added district Technology Director Bret Simpson. "Not every student would have the opportunity or the experience of carrying a laptop if it weren't for something like this."

The application of Bonham Independent School District and Arp ISD, which collaborated with Bonham for the grant, was one of only 11 approved for the Connections Grant. Arp will receive approximately $200,000 of the award with Bonham using the rest.

"Our students today, they've grown up in the video game world," Cruse said. It's about engaging those students, many of whom spend their time playing games with an 11-button controller.

The grant wasn't won easily. In addition to an in-person interview in Austin, it required applicants to develop a plan to put a computer, equipped with digital content, into every student's hands. And that plan must be one other districts can model.

"In order to meet the needs of our students today we have to learn to do things differently," Cruse said. "We have to learn to be smarter where we can, to teach more effectively, to embrace technology where it can be a productive instructional tool."

The district will receive its first part of the two-year grant Oct. 1. In the mean time they have plenty of planning to do.

Challenges for the district's technology staff include beefing up the high school's wireless network and devising a way students can swap a dead battery for a charged one throughout the day. Administrators also have to figure out how they will roll out computers to 500 high schoolers and deal with the varying states in which the machines will be returned.

District officials seem to be off to a good start, however. They plan to seek proposals soon from computer vendors. Simpson said the student computers they're looking for will be somewhere between a high-end netbook and a low-end notebook. They'll be Wi-Fi (wireless Internet) ready and loaded with word processing software. Also, all the campus' textbooks will be installed before the computers are issued to students, keeping at bay, any requirement that students have Internet access at home.

Cruse said the district also plans to make Wi-Fi available in the student parking lot should students find themselves in need after school hours.

Besides a plan that was creative enough to win the grant to help them with what Simpson said was a "massive undertaking, administrators will have the support of Arp ISD. Arp already has successfully implemented a laptop program at its junior high school, and its teachers will help train Bonham educators.

"Basically we'll eat this elephant one bite at a time, ... so it's not overwhelming for any of our teachers or students," Cruse said.

The district hopes to have the computers to the high school teachers and a small group of students by the end of the fall semester. Simpson said the students who receive the computers early will provide additional support for the teachers and other students when the time comes. Cruse said, realistically, they hope to start issuing computers to the general student body by the spring.

"The bottom line, our mission is to improve learning," Cruse said. "So we're just trying embrace those things that will do that for us, that will give our kids a competitive edge in the classroom."