Wait and see. Lately, the Beaufort County Board of Education has been living by these words.
While neighboring school districts move forward in purchases of student notebooks and software for paperless meetings, Beaufort County Schools has been slow to move on either front.
Our neighboring school districts have become our guinea pigs. Beaufort County Schools gives them time to test the waters, gets reactions and makes sound judgments based on the additional data.
The strategy appears to be working with the notebooks. Beaufort County Schools determined that notebooks and notepads could not replace a good laptop computer. The first purchase of laptops was made recently. The wait also saved the school district a bit of money as technology continued to advance and the price of the selected laptop decreased.
Board members bring up the benefits of a paperless system at every meeting. Rather than mailing 50-page packets to members before monthly meetings, the information would be available electronically. The Washington City Council made that move a little more than a year ago.
Despite being anxious to switch to an electronic, paperless system, board members did not jump at the first software presented to them. Instead, the board tasked Don Phipps, Beaufort County Schools superintendent, to research what other school districts are using and paying for similar systems.
Will the paperless software system be worth the trouble?
Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.