Laptop South Florida

Laptop South Florida (LSF) is the name of the organization we are forming to bring OLPC laptop computers and our own unique* teacher-training to the children of Immokalee this summer. The pilot is going strong, under the guidance of Naples Social Action - especially of Jane, who is lead teacher and acting executive director of LSF.

I suppose if Jane is acting executive director, that makes me acting chairman of the board - even though we haven't officially named a board yet, I have gathered 11 folks to be on it.

In filing for our 501(c)(3) status with the IRS, I had to produce a budget. I sat down and came up with a $2.9 million plan, mostly for teacher-trainer pay and to cover the cost of laptops. There is minimal administrative and overhead built into it, mostly in the form of fundraising and marketing: it takes money to make money, even (or especially?) in the citizen sector.

$2.9 million may seem like a lot of money, but our plan is to give computers and training to tens of thousands of kids in South Florida over the next few years. If you look at the money this community generates for charity each year, it's a drop in the bucket. The Philharmonic Center for the Arts ("The Phil"), for instance, is said to have a $90 million endowment. Art is important for a community, absolutely. But not nearly as vital as education. These children we're working with are the artists, museum curators, and wealthy philanthropists of the future. They'll be our doctors, lawyers, inventors, political and business leaders.

Or we can leave them as they are, and half of these wonderful, brilliant, inspired children won't graduate from high school. Some will join gangs and deal drugs. Others will get pregnant at 16. Two or three million dollars isn't such a huge amount when viewed from that perspective, is it? We should actually set our sights much higher - but this will do for a start.


*I have resigned from the board of the Waveplace Foundation, for reasons of my own. True, Waveplace taught our teachers how to use software called Squeek eToys, which we are using in the Immokalee pilot. We are grateful for their help, and they have been paid for providing it.

I call our training unique, though, because it became apparent early on that Waveplace training, while adequate for the teachers, was not geared toward 8- and 9-year-olds. Our teachers had to completely recreate the training course for these children. What they have done in this summer program uses eToys, yes. But it is dramatically different from - and far improved over - the course that Waveplace created.

Squeek and eToys are both open-source, Linux-based, software programs. Waveplace did not invent them, and because they're open source, everyone in the world "owns" them. It's one of those commie Internet things that I don't fully understand, but that I do enjoy.