"At our school, we want every student to have daily access to a graphing calculator to use in the classroom. Equally important, we want this access to extend to the student’s home as well.
The idea we developed for accomplishing this is simple. We ask each student to purchase a graphing calculator. For those students who cannot afford to purchase a graphing calculator, we will rent them one for $20 per year. The rental fee helps us replenish our supply of rental calculators. There is a loss associated with this each year, but the rental fee helps cover these losses.
We purchase TI-83 Plus graphing calculators for the rental program, while we encourage students to buy the TI-84 Plus family if they are going to purchase a graphing calculator for themselves. If a student happens to lose a rental calculator during the school year, we do ask them to replace it at full value.
All of our students complete a rental agreement at the beginning of the year. When a student cannot afford the $20 to rent a graphing calculator for the school year, we allow the student to use one of the rental calculators free of charge for the year.
One of the best things to come out of this approach is that several parents have donated graphing calculators to our program. Thanks to this generosity, students who are not financially able to purchase a graphing calculator have one to use in school and at home.
Students who can afford a graphing calculator have a valuable math and science educational tool they will be able to use for years to come. Overall, our program has been a great success, especially for the students who cannot afford a graphing calculator. Students who lose their graphing calculator like this program as well, because they can rent a replacement graphing calculator. For them, the $20 rental fee is more manageable than the full cost of a new graphing calculator.
We plan on continuing this program at our school. With it, all of our students are able to participate fully and actively in their mathematics classes.”
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