Dear editor,
Lake Orion Community Schools will be seeking voter approval for a bond on February 22, 2011. Over the next few months, you will no doubt hear many comments both for and against this proposal.
I would like to start these discussions by asking you to consider the following questions: Would you go to a bank that did not have the ability to perform online bill payment?
Would you get a photographer for your daughter’s wedding that didn’t use a digital camera?
Would you go to an eye surgeon who did not have a laser to perform Lasik, but instead cut open your cornea?
If you answered no to any of the above questions, then why would you want to send your children to a school where the teachers do not have the proper technology to instruct the students of today using the technologies of today?
John Dewey once wrote, “If we teach today’s children as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” This may never have been truer than it is with the “i generation.?
Today’s students learn differently. They have never known a world without the Internet and cell phones.
Educators know that we must harness their enthusiasm for technology and use it to teach them in ways we as adults never would have dreamed possible when we were in school.
This type of education is happening all around us. Brandon recently passed a bond proposal for technology. Now all of their buildings are wireless and all of their classrooms are equipped with interactive whiteboards and projectors, document cameras, a sound system to enable students to hear their teachers and their classmates without straining, and many other technological items.
And Brandon isn’t alone. Many districts in our area and certainly across the state have passed bonds to bring their classrooms into the 21st Century.
Fourteen years ago when Lake Orion High School was built, it was state-of-the-art.
Times change. Fourteen years ago gasoline was $1.22 a gallon and there were an estimated one million websites. Many estimates put the number of websites today at well over 250 million.
We owe it to our students to give them a competitive edge. In today’s world, that means we have to teach them how to use technology to be productive in a global marketplace.
Please keep these thoughts in mind over the next few months as you ponder the choice you will make when you cast your ballot in February.
– Melissa Middleton