Ali­cia Llanos

Gov­ern­ment will spend $83 mil­lion on 20,400 lap­tops for SEA stu­dents.

The lap­tops are ex­pect­ed to ar­rive in mid-Sep­tem­ber.

The an­nounce­ment was made yes­ter­day by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh, dur­ing a news brief­ing held at the min­istry's of­fice on Alexan­dra Street, Port-of-Spain Gopeesingh said: "I am pleased to an­nounce that the eval­u­a­tion process for the bids sub­mit­ted in re­sponse to the stu­dent lap­top ini­tia­tive has been com­plet­ed, and the best over­all ac­cept­ed pro­pos­al has been ac­cept­ed as Hewlett-Packard.

"The cost of the pre­ferred bid­der is ap­prox­i­mate­ly $83 mil­lion," he added. Gopeesingh said 20,400 lap­tops were or­dered from Hewlett-Packard, and were ex­pect­ed to ar­rive in T&T by mid-Sep­tem­ber. The new school term be­gins Sep­tem­ber 6, and there­fore new sec­ondary school stu­dents will not have their lap­tops as the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship had promised dur­ing its elec­tion cam­paign. When cal­cu­lat­ed, the av­er­age cost of one lap­top worked out to be $4,068. Of the 17,270 pupils who wrote the ex­am­i­na­tion this year, 2,000 scored less than 30 per cent. How­ev­er, 401 will re­peat, while 1,599 will be al­lowed to at­tend sec­ondary schools, but un­der a re­me­di­al sys­tem. This means that in all, 16,869 stu­dents will be giv­en lap­tops.

As to why the ex­tra 3,531 lap­tops were or­dered, Gopeesingh said:

"We want to make sure we have enough for the teach­ers who would be work­ing with the stu­dents as well." Gopeesingh said be­cause of the lim­i­ta­tions in the cur­rent ed­u­ca­tion bud­get, mon­ey to fi­nance the ma­chines would be bor­rowed from the Min­istry of Fi­nance. He said the two min­istries were in dis­cus­sions per­tain­ing to the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion re­pay­ing the Min­istry of Fi­nance for the monies bor­rowed.

He said out of eight bids, Hewlett-Packard, Ac­er and Fu­jit­su were se­lect­ed as the top three. Gopeesingh said Hewlett-Packard was se­lect­ed on the ba­sis of pric­ing and the as­sur­ance of the ma­chines "rel­e­vance and ap­plic­a­bil­i­ty."

He said the bids and prospec­tive com­put­ers were eval­u­at­ed by teams from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board to en­sure trans­paren­cy. Gopeesingh said the ma­chines would be work­ing on the Com­mon­wealth of Ed­u­ca­tion soft­ware, which would even­tu­al­ly be re­mod­elled specif­i­cal­ly for stu­dents in T&T.

He said a goal for the fu­ture would be to elim­i­nate text­books and pro­vide all learn­ing ma­te­r­i­al through com­put­er soft­ware. Ad­dress­ing pub­lic con­cerns about se­cu­ri­ty, Gopeesingh said the lap­tops would be out­fit­ted with the track­ing de­vice–Com­pu­trace–and once re­port­ed stolen, the lap­top's In­ter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty would be per­ma­nent­ly dis­abled.

He said stu­dents would be al­lowed to take their lap­tops home. For those who wish to leave theirs at school, how­ev­er, ac­com­mo­da­tion would be pro­vid­ed. Gopeesingh said the min­istry was cur­rent­ly ne­go­ti­at­ing ex­tend­ed war­ranties on the lap­tops. He said to ac­com­mo­date the new tech­nol­o­gy, 151 IT tech­ni­cians would be as­signed to schools. "More in­ten­sive sup­port and main­te­nance ser­vice agree­ments are crit­i­cal in or­der to en­sure on-site tech­ni­cal sup­port," he said. The min­is­ter said all schools would have se­cure com­put­er labs for all stu­dents and band­width con­nec­tions were be­ing up­grad­ed from 3G to 5G. He dis­missed claims that To­ba­go stu­dents were not get­ting lap­tops.

He as­sured that all stu­dents in T&T would re­ceive their promised lap­tops for the new term. When asked as to whether he could as­sure the lap­top ini­tia­tive would con­tin­ue in the fu­ture, Gopeesingh said he had all con­fi­dence it would. "The ben­e­fits of the lap­top ini­tia­tive ex­tend be­yond sim­ply fa­cil­i­tat­ing the de­liv­ery of sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion and di­rect­ly ad­dress the is­sue of the dig­i­tal di­vide," he said. "The Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion is con­fi­dent that this will yield ad­di­tion­al ben­e­fits and val­ue for the stu­dents and by ex­ten­sion, their fam­i­lies."

–With re­port­ing by Leah So­rias

Lap­top specs

Gopeesingh said the lap­tops had been out­fit­ted with the fol­low­ing en­hanced spec­i­fi­ca­tions:

�2 faster pro­cess­ing speeds;

�2 im­proved wire­less ca­pa­bil­i­ty;

�2 blue­tooth con­nec­tiv­i­ty;

�2 larg­er in­ter­nal stor­age;

�2 faster hard speed;

�2 ex­tend­ed bat­ter life;

�2 Mi­crosoft Of­fice Home and Stu­dent 2007; and

�2 Learn­ing Es­sen­tials 2.0 for Mi­crosoft Of­fice.