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On June 16, as required by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, the Bangor School Board approved a three-year technology plan for the district. The plan, formally known as the Comprehensive Information (Library Media) and Technology Plan, will help keep the Bangor schools up to speed with technology.

“If the school wants to qualify for federal dollars, you have to put together this plan,” said high school Principal Don Addington. He said he sees value in a process that is a lot of work and that can sometimes seem like jumping through one bureaucratic hoop after another.

“People sometimes throw up their hands and say ‘This is just too much bureaucracy,’ but once you focus, it does help you look at where you’ve been and where best to put your dollars,” Addington said.

“It’s a long-range look at our needs,” said district Superintendent Roger Foegen. “Technology is always changing —it’s the one thing that’s constantly in need of upgrading. It’s also extremely important for preparing our students for the world that they are going to enter after graduation.”

The district has an advisory committee made up of parents, teachers, secretaries and others. As chairman of the technology committee that wrote the three-year plan, Addington noted that the plan had more to do with setting goals and ways to keep the technology updated than with adding fancy new hardware — at least for now.

“Right now we’re not adding or replacing anything specifically,” he said.

Both Addington and Foegen expressed satisfaction with the district’s embrace of technology.

“At the moment we’re doing well,” Foegen said. “We’ve been fortunate to get the support of the community with a couple of building referendums at key times in recent years. Both projects had dollars set aside to upgrade technology. That allowed us to put in the wiring and fiber optics needed — we’re pretty seamless as far as technology goes.”

The new elementary school will have both a stationary computer lab and a mobile lab. When the high school computer lab gets new iMacs next year, the old computers will be used in the elementary school. “The computers the elementary kids use don’t need to be as high-powered as the ones the high school kids need,” Addington said.

He estimated the school system has more than 200 computers, plus a half dozen SMART Boards (interactive teaching tools that allow students to control computers by touching keyboard images projected on a screen big enough for an entire class to see).

“As a district, I’d say we are on a par or maybe even ahead of other local districts technology-wise,” Addington said.

Addington said he feels comfortable with the current level of technology offered in the district. “Sometimes I’ll hear administrators from other districts say ‘We’re going to get a SMART Board’ and I say “We’ve already got five or six of them.

“Of course, some districts have far more than we do, but I think some schools get new technology just because it’s new,” Addington continued. “I think that kind of approach is wrong. It’s much better to first ask how we can improve our teaching, and then figure out what kind of technology can get us to where we want to be — as far as gadgetry, there’s a lot of temptation out there for school districts.”