UXBRIDGE — Superintendent Michael Baldassarre has issued an update in the wake of Tuesday’s incident involving a malfunctioning laptop at Whitin Intermediate School.
Students in the district using ACER C734 Chromebooks will need to turn their laptops in at their schools on Wednesday morning, and a thorough safety evaluation will be conducted. About 155,000 C734 Chromebooks are being used across the U.S., and ACER says this is the first incident of its type.
ACER is working on sending loaner Chromebooks to the district. It is also sending a technician to the Whitin Intermediate School on Wednesday to review the affected laptop.
“We want to make sure we evaluate what happened with this unit before we move forward” using that model, Superintendent Baldassarre said.
ACER has confirmed that they will send 450 devices that have the appropriate operating system so that the MCAS assessments can be administered.
For now, MCAS testing is postponed ONLY for students in grades 4 through 6. State education regulations call for all MCAS testing to be complete by April 26. The district is working to reschedule those students’ testing while also meeting the state deadline.
Superintendent Baldassarre wants to thank everyone involved in this situation for their patience and their hard work, particularly the district’s Technology Director, Jessica Brittingham.
“We appreciate the patience being shown by our students and parents as we work to get to the bottom of this incident,” Superintendent Baldassarre said. “Things have been handled so properly and so well by everyone involved.”
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