Sunnyside sets up the 'One-to-One Consortium' for other districts to follow | News

The Sunnyside Unified School District is establishing the SUSD One-to-One Consortium for Urban School Districts to assist other districts across the U.S. in creating their own Project Graduation and One-to-One Computing. 

According to a Sunnyside District news release, the District’s replication team will provide direct services and support to the Consortium schools to integrate technology within classroom instruction at the elementary, middle and high school levels. Support will include on-site professional development, webinars, conference calls, workshops, classroom observations and direct coaching. Sunnyside is planning a consortium conference in Tucson at the beginning of October.

School districts that are participating in the consortium receive assistance customized to their goals and needs. Some will focus on Project Graduation, including the Digital Advantage program to award laptops to high school students; others will focus on one-to-one computing, which assigns a personal computer to each student.

The districts participating in this Consortium are San Carlos Unified School District and Yuma Union High School District in Arizona; Pawtucket School District in Providence County, Rhode Island; Kokomo-Center Schools in Howard County, Indiana; and Massillon City Schools in Stark County, Ohio.  Replication school districts pay a fee to the Sunnyside District.

Business sponsors of the Consortium include Cox Communications with ‘gold’ status for donating $20,000; BLE Group, CSC Learning and Tyler Technologies with ‘silver’ status for donating $10,000; and DynEd with ‘bronze’ status for donating $5,000.d.

The Sunnyside District has gained national recognition for its technology initiatives from organizations such as the Intel Corporation, Pearson Education, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, CDW-G, Tech & Learning magazine, District Administrator magazine, the National School Boards Association and the American School Board Journal. The district has been recognized as one of several districts across the nation nominated to participate as a Project RED (Revolutionizing Education) Signature District. Project RED is a nationally recognized research organization dedicated to revolutionizing education through the successful implementation of technology in the classroom.

This school year, the Sunnyside District will be assigning laptops to every student in grades 4 – 9 with funding provided by a voter approved bond from November 2011.  One-to-one computing got its start in Sunnyside with Project Graduation’s Digital Advantage in 2008. Two years ago, personal computers were assigned to all fifth-graders and last year one-to-one was expanded to include all sixth-graders.