My hometown’s school board took their budget to the voters yesterday and it went down in a big way. The proposed $53.7 million dollar school budget lost by a 2-1 margin. A second initiative, to supply individual laptop computers to each and every high school student at a cost of $391,705 per year for the next four years, was voted down by a whopping 6-1 margin. Score one for the taxpayers.

The base budget was lofty in its own right, proposing a laptop computer for every single high school teacher, two hardwired PCs in every classroom, and 20 portable laptop computer carts. Each laptop cart would contain 24 laptops, with the intent of sharing the carts between the high school’s 78 classrooms.

The school district’s “Ad Hoc” technology committee came up with the one-to-one laptop idea. While laptops for everyone might be a good idea in less economically and technologically fortunate (as well as geographically diverse) areas, such as the State of Maine, the voters in this town made it clear that this approach was not welcome in a municipality with a household Internet-connected computer rate of over 95%.

The fact that we’re simultaneously facing a $1G per year increase in school taxes couldn’t have helped the laptops-for-all mindset.