Arizona District Starts New Year with Technology Changes

With new transitions, assessments and possible national standards, schools are changing the way they educate. Vail School District in Arizona is no stranger to this, and we are seeing a variety of new programs spring up in response to all of these changes.

At Cienega High School, students can join online classes, but only if they bring in their own technology for the course. Students there can bring in their own laptops, iPads and iPod Touches for the classroom. All they really need is to be able to access the Internet and write papers. Cienega is hoping to turn into a laptop school.

Vail High School has recently become a laptop school. Students there use laptops in the same ways that Empire High School uses theirs.

Empire High School has undergone various changes for the 2010-2011school year. The changes have been made in many different areas of the school, including budget, technology and architecture.

The Joint Technological Educational District (JTED) has its own building on Empire High School’s campus. Career cluster classes that JTED offers include anatomy, ecology and nursing. Students from any school in the Vail School District can take the nursing course. 

The freshmen of the 2010-2011 year have HP notebook computers instead of Mac laptops. The computer interface and plug-ins are different, so new hardware needs to be bought to connect their computers to projectors.

A number of teachers have left Empire, and not enough teachers can be hired to replace them all. In addition, the cap on the number of students attending the school has increased. Teachers now have joint classes that combine different grade levels together. For example, journalism teacher Mrs. Dujmic teaches both freshmen and sophomore English in the same class during 6th period.

The changes in the computers and teachers are all because of budget cuts. However, a lowering of budget doesn’t necessarily mean a lowering of education. The HP computers are fully capable of completing the necessary tasks of the classroom, and the freshmen and sophomores still get different levels of learning even though they are in the same class.

Through all the changes, the school runs at the same pace it always has. If anything, it is better than before because of new course options and new technology such as the student scanner in the Tech Office.

Areas touched on in this introduction to Empire High School’s new year will be stretched into full articles in the future. Those articles will be written by returning writers Spencer Taylor and Julianne Capati, and the newly added Shelby Archuleta.