The 1:1 Initiative program has been expanded this fall at Northampton Area Middle School for the 2016-17 school year.

Starting in January, the program provided Chromebooks - laptops running Chrome OS as the operating system - to sixth-grade students.

This fall, those sixth-grade students advanced to the seventh grade, and the program expanded to include eighth-grade students and incoming sixth-grade students.

In a presentation earlier this year to the Northampton Area School District Board of Education, Joseph S. Kovalchik, Northampton Area School District superintendent of schools; Lydia Hanner, NASD director of curriculum and instruction; Kurt Paccio, NASD director of technology; Patrice Turner, NAMS principal; and Scott Oste, NAMS sixth-grade science teacher, explained various aspects of the sixth-grade pilot program.

“When we were first considering one to one, we took the time,” Turner said.

Project PRIDE (PRoject-based, Inquiry-based, Digitally Enriched learning) has been ongoing since 2007 with the goal of enhancing instruction with technology resources.

“This is an infusion of technology with curriculum,” Hanner explained.

In 2014-15, the district established a 21st-century Learning Committee to study 1:1 computing and learning programs. During spring and summer 2015, administrative research and planning took place.

Teachers and students gave testimonials to the effectiveness of the pilot program at the April 25 board meeting. Statistics were presented concerning, for example, students’ home Internet access (97 percent) and skills (multi-media, 60 percent).

According to the district website, Project PRIDE was spurred in part by the Pennsylvania Classrooms for the Future program and a Keystones to Opportunities grant. NASD has invested in training and equipment, including computers, document cameras, interactive projectors and video studios.