BEVERLY — Junior high students at St. Barnabas School in Beverly will have new pencils, fresh paper and an iPad in their backpacks on the first day of school next year.
The school at 10134 S. Longwood Drive is the first in the area to mandate iPads for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students, Principal Elaine Gaffney said.
"I think one of the things we see with the iPads is much more hands-on learning," said Gaffney, who has been principal at the school at 10121 S. Longwood Drive since 2014.
She said the decision to mandate tablet computers came after researching high schools that St. Barnabas graduates attend. About 80 percent of grads over the past three years have gone on to schools that mandate iPads for incoming freshmen, Gaffney said.
To name a few, Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School, Marist High School, St. Rita High School and St. Ignatius College Prep all require new students to have their own iPads. Feedback from these schools and others convinced St. Barnabas teachers and administrators to bring the program to junior high students.
The high schools all "spoke about how powerful it would be if our students came prepared to use iPads," said Gaffney, adding that St. Barnabas' enrollment is 566 students this year — 177 of whom will need to buy an iPad for the 2016/17 school year.
St. Barnabas will require them to buy iPad Air 2 tablets with 64 gigabits of storage and Wi-Fi-only connectivity. These devices cost about $700. Parents can buy the iPads through the school or independently, said Andy Walsh, assistant principal at St. Barnabas.
The devices used by St. Barnabas students will all be connected to AirWatch, a management system for mobile computers. Thus, only school administrators will be able to add apps onto the devices and install updates from a central hub. The platform also allows teachers to monitor student iPads as well shut down any device that is lost or stolen.
Students "cannot add things that we don't approve," Walsh said.
Though he was also quick to point out that all of the high schools encouraging St. Barnabas to implement the iPad program also recommended parents and teachers give the students as much autonomy as possible with the devices, Walsh said.
"If kids make that device their own, they tend to take better care of it," Gaffney said.
She said there are other schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago with similar programs, but St. Barnabas will the first to mandate iPads in the area known as Vicariate 5, Council 10A. Besides St. Barnabas, this area includes most of the schools on the Far Southwest Side. The others are St. Bede, St. Cajetan, Christ the King, St. Christina, St. John Fisher, Holy Redeemer, Queen of Martyrs and St. Walter.
"I definitely feel like the other schools will follow suit," Gaffney said.
She said St. Barnabas invested roughly $75,000 to re-wire its facilities in anticipation of the program. So all the iPads should be able to run smoothly. Teachers have also been working monthly with a technology consultant who answers their questions as well as offers tips for how to best implement the iPads in the classroom, Gaffney said.
The school already has 36 iPads on two shared, mobile carts. With the junior high about to get its own iPads, these carts will soon become more readily available to the younger students, she said.
Of course, the program is not without risk. Parents and teachers will always be on the lookout for cyber bullying, access to inappropriate content and iPads becoming a nuisance rather than a tool for learning, Gaffney said.
Still, she believes the rewards of adding iPads outweigh these risks and said students have always found ways to distract themselves and their classmates while in school.
"Our form of distraction was passing notes down the aisle," she said.
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