Two recent Dartmouth graduates, in collaboration with a teacher from a high school in south Bronx, N.Y., have begun a program that will transfer Dartmouth students' old laptop computers to the hands of students at New Day Academy, in an effort to improve the education of underprivileged youth. The academy, which teaches grades six through 12, was founded in 2005 to replace Theodore Roosevelt Gathings Middle School, a failing school in the area.
Blake Johnson '05 and Russ Daiber '06 conceived the project after stumbling upon a high school teacher's listing on craigslist.org soliciting a computer for one of his students. The teacher, Tom Lascher, had given his old laptop computer, which later broke, to the student a year before so the student could work on projects and do research at home. Through correspondence with Lascher, Johnson and Daiber learned that many students at the New Day Academy, where Lascher teaches, were in need of computers.
New Day Academy is a charter school, founded as part of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to reinvigorate the city's school system by dividing large, struggling schools into several smaller schools. The academy shares its facility with other middle and elementary schools.
"It is more difficult for us to share resources," Lascher said. "We share a lunchroom and a gym with the other schools, but because the student populations are isolated from one another, it makes it hard to share technology and libraries."
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the average income of residents in the south Bronx, where New Day Academy is located, is less than half the national average. The percentage of adults who have below high school education is nearly twice as high as the state average, and single-parent households make up 7.2 percent of the population in the region, compared to a five percent state average.
"I want people to know that these students do need the computers," Johnson said. "This school is in one of the poorest neighborhoods in America."
Last weekend Johnson visited Alpha Delta fraternity, where he was a member, to discuss the "administrative overhead" of the program with AD's philanthropy chair, Matt Alkaitis '09, and AD's alumni adviser, John Engelman '68.
"I thought about what I knew was going on at Dartmouth where a lot of people have computers that get slow, have no resale value and aren't wanted anymore, and I thought there should be a way to formalize this and distribute them to students," Johnson said. "I knew about the need in schools like this because my own mother is a school principal."
The program, now in its pilot phase, is collecting donated laptops at AD, although members of the fraternity contacted by The Dartmouth said they had not heard about the project. Johnson will take the laptops from Alkaitis at the end of Spring term and bring them to New York. So far, no laptops have been collected, but AD has begun a campaign to inform the Dartmouth community about the program, Alkaitis said in an e-mail to The Dartmouth. Plans to raise awareness include hosting a party, contacting leaders of other Greek organizations to inform their members about the program and soliciting donations through campus-wide e-mails, he added.
"I'm curious to find out how many people have relatively functional laptops and whether or not they are willing to donate them," Alkaitis said. "Hopefully we will be able to convince them that donating an old computer will make an enormous impact on the education of these kids. Since the current drive marks the inception of the program, I think we can consider it a success if we are able to provide at least a few kids or classrooms with access to a laptop."
Johnson and Daiber would like to expand the program in the future, they said. Johnson said he is waiting to see how many computers are available for donation and test the condition of the computers before setting up similar programs at other universities.
Having witnessed the educational power of computers, Lascher encouraged donations.
"I've been the kind of person with an old computer that I didn't know what to do with," Lascher said. "I was glad to give away my old computer because now that I'm a teacher, I can see that some people have nothing. I can absolutely promise any computer we get will go to someone who really needs it. We know when students have computers they learn better, and it makes things more interesting for them."
