MARK KIESLING: Learn from laptop mistakes, don't repeat them

I can understand and appreciate, in a way, the decision by School City of East Chicago officials to require the kids to keep their school-issued laptops at school.

There's been some abuse, as there always will be when you hand out something for free. At least one of the computers has ended up in Mexico and another on Craigslist.

Two students reported being robbed of their $1,200 laptops on the way home. An Illinois teen has been charged with that armed robbery.

But to leave them at school kind of negates the point, which I thought was to have students study and do homework on their laptops, not to sit and watch them in class all day. Are we trying to make teachers redundant?

Surely school officials knew there was a potential for problems. Kids are going to drop them, lose them or do other things kids (and a lot of adults) are prone to do.

And there is going to be a certain amount of hanky-panky: Theft, for example. And are students any more in danger of being held up for their laptops than for their expensive clothing?

And it wasn't a moment that covered the school in glory last week when the school sent police to accompany students to their homes if they had failed to bring in their laptops.

It's a different problem than in Munster, where students were required to buy laptops this year. The East Chicago program has been in place, by the way, for 10 months.

Munster school officials say there have been no incidents involving the laptops, which I take to mean none have been reported lost, stolen, accidentally run over or put onto eBay.

But I've heard from teachers who have said there's been a problem with students who surreptitiously use the laptop cameras to record teachers and posting the results on places such as YouTube.

Editing is everything. You can make the teacher look like a doofus or like they spend the day doing nothing, and it becomes fodder for laughter.

But laptops are the wave of the future, and more and more schools are going to move toward giving them or selling them to their students depending on the economic status of the student body.

We can learn from East Chicago. The students need the laptops at home where the homework (as the name implies) is done, where the independent studying takes place.

We can learn from Munster, which while charging for the laptops -- up to about $1,600 -- never sought parental input about the types and models that would best suit them. I mean, they should at least have some say about something they are going to end up owning.

East Chicago and Munster are two different communities, so it is neither fair nor accurate to draw too many comparisons.

But one common denominator is that they both have something to teach the educators about getting laptops to students.

The opinions are solely those of the writer. He can be reached at mark.kiesling@nwi.com or (219) 933-4170.