By Jessie Rosenfeld
Staff Writer
The Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Trustees approved the purchase of 40 new iMacs and 40 new HP Windows-based workstation computers on Feb. 5 for Mira Costa.
The board funded this purchase to facilitate Common Core testing. This year, Costa’s junior class will take the Common Core test as a trial run in May. With the addition of these computers, Costa will have 200 computers among five computer labs.
“It is something we have to do for the Common Core testing,” MBUSD Board President Karen Komatinsky said. “It falls in line with what we want as a district. We want to ensure that we have students that are prepared for new changes.”
The computers will also be used for the Advanced Placement JAVA computer science class, photography classes and advanced and future computer science courses.
“Technology is here, and it is what we use on a day-to-day basis,” Komatinsky said. “We want to make sure the students are progressive, especially relative to Common Core testing from a device application perspective.”
The computers will be placed in rooms 116 A and B, which will replace the room 12 computer lab. One lab will include all iMac computers and the other will include only PC computers.
“Down the road we are looking for more involvement in programing and things of that nature, so having dual platforming will be useful.” MBUSD Deputy Superintendent Dr. Rick Bagley said.
The computers in the foreign language lab in room 49 will also be replaced with the purchase of the new PCs. The software for language classes is PC based, so the language lab must use PCs.
“I was the one that put the language lab together a long time ago with grant money,” Vice Principal Jaime Mancilla said. “It is nice to have new computers and, hopefully, we will be able to do new stuff.”
These computers will also be available for classroom use.
“The computers are definitely a perk that comes with Common Core, and we could certainly use them,” Costa Vice Principal Deborah Hofreiter said.
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