San Diego City Schools has a state-approved Educational Technology Strategic Plan that provides a roadmap for the district to improve student academic achievement through the use of technology. One objective of the plan is to provide all students with adequate access to one-to-one computing resources to meet their learning needs.

Looking for a cost-effective way to deliver portable computing to every student, the San Diego Unified School District is installing machines with desktop Linux and other open-source software. In turning to open source, San Diego joins a growing number of school systems aiming to extend computing resources affordably to more users...

The school district will be using open-source applications included in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop for office productivity, audio and video, web browsing, geography, language arts, math, and science. Before beginning the project, officials realized that--in a district with 130,000 students, 7,000 teachers, and close to 70 percent of students on the free or reduced-price lunch program--SDUSD would have to evaluate carefully how the laptops would be purchased and how the program would be financed...For the project's hardware, San Diego is working with Lenovo to custom-design the laptops.

Source: eSchoolNews, June 21, 2007