Beginning this fall, freshman at Tremont High School in Itawamba County will receive individual laptops from the local Parent Teacher Organization.

School principal Eddie Moore told the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal that about 40 laptops cost about $12,000.

Moore said they will be distributed to students much like textbooks, with their return expected by the end of the year.

Moore said new laptops will be purchased for the freshman class each year. He said students who make it through four years of high school and graduate will be able to take the computers home.

Moore said the school couldn’t afford laptops for all students.

“You have to start somewhere. If you start with seniors, you don’t have the benefit of the laptops being used for subject area tests. We wanted to get the most bang for our buck,” he said.

Assistant principal Michael Cates said equipping freshman with laptops seemed to be the perfect way to prepare them for a world that relies on computer fluency as much as language.

“Some of our biggest classes are ninth through 12th, so it’s hard to accommodate all of them and get them into a computer lab as much as they need to be.

“And even if you do get them in a lab once or twice a week, there’s no comparison to being able to have technology at your fingertips every period of the day They’ll have that technology with them from first period to last. You just can’t do that with a lab,” Cates said.

Moore said the school was not getting rid of textbooks.

“A textbook’s really just a resource and this is just another resource,” Moore said. “We don’t need to replace one resource with another; we need to add to, not take away.”