New Student Computers Coming to Manassas Park Schools

Students heading home for the summer today have at least one thing to look forward to when they return (some reluctantly) to their classrooms in the fall—new computers.

 This month, the Manassas Park School Board approved the purchase of 98 new laptops for Manassas Park Middle School.  The new computers will replace the aging 6-year-old units that were put in place when the school was built.

At $841.97 a piece, the school division will pay a total of $82,513 for the upgrade, according to school division documents.

 Each of the new Dell Latitude E5420s has 2.0 gigabytes of memory.

 The school division also ordered 200 new desktop computers for student workstations in Manassas Park High, Manassas Middle and Cougar Elementary Schools.

The computers at Cougar Elementary School are seven years old, McDade said.

 The 200 new computers costs a total of $129,950. Each of the Opiplex 390 Desktops costs $649.75 each.

 McDade told board members this month that the new computers are much needed for education.

"We are always in need of laptops, particularly for our SOL (Standards of Learning) testing program," McDade.

The purchases are part of Fiscal Year 2012's budget, McDade said.

As a result, the new equipment must arrived before June 30.