Finalists announced via the following email:

Ladies and Gentlemen:

First, thank you to all of you for your efforts in applying for the 1:1 Pilot program. The selection committee expressed great pleasure with the quality and attention paid in the applications.

Please also keep in mind that the success of the pilots will pave the way for a second roll-out next year, which will hopefully afford many of you the opportunity to move forward with this program with strategies and programming already established by this first round of sites. We will make all the project documentation available as this progresses so you can be thinking about how to make it work in your districts in the future. (www.k12partners.org will continue to be the main repository for this project)

Based on the averaged scores assessed by the members of the selection committee, the three pilot sites are:

Malheur ESD
High Desert ESD
Northwest Regional ESD


The members of the selection committee were Jim Sager (Policy advisor to Gov. Kulongoski on Education & Workforce), Aaron Ray (Education technology consultant, Clarity Innovations, Inc.), and Kathryn Dysart (Director of Communications, Oregon Community College Assn.).

If applicants wish to have specific feedback on their applications, please contact me directly. I am happy to relay any comments from the scoring sheets.

Congratulations to the three finalists, and to all of you who put so much thought and effort into this process.

My best,

Leslie

Partnership Technology Director
ODE/OAESD

This is the body of the email I sent today to all applicants:

Ladies and Gentlemen -

I will have the final, validated selections for you all at the end of this week. At that time I will also announce who the selection committee members are so you know who reviewed and scored your applications.

The process has gone beautifully, and you should be proud of the efforts you each made (and that your peers have made) in applying for this pilot program. The overall quality, thoughtfulness, and due diligence in the overwhelming majority of the applications has been raised and lauded by the selection committee more than a few times during their deliberations. It reflects so well on each of your agencies that the caliber of response is so high, and that numerous re-reads and extended discussions have been essential for the committee members to reach their conclusions.

I know you are all anxious to find out the outcome, and to be able to move forward with continued time constraints. We will work to make this as smooth a roll-out for the finalists as possible over the coming weeks and months.

The only caveat to the end-of-week deadline for announcements is that we must coordinate with Intel on their press release process, and I haven't heard back from them yet on how that needs to look. I will do my very best to at least secure permission to release winners' names by Friday so planning can begin immediately thereafter.

My deepest gratitude for taking this process seriously, and for working to help bring new opportunities to children across this gorgeous state of ours.

Leslie
Partnership Technology Director
ODE/OAESD

Everyone -

I can't tell you how pleased we are to be able to share these numbers: 11 ESD's have applied to participate in the 1:1 Pilot!

The selection committee meets this Monday, September 25, and we will hopefully be ready to announce the three finalists by end of day Wednesday, September 27.

Best of luck to all who have applied.

As I finish my 5th reading of the grant documentation to make sure I am not missing something, I find that a paragraph on the second page sums things up for me:

"As you begin to review and assess your capacity to manage one of the three Pilots, keep in mind that this is merely a first step into a long term, reformation of K12 teaching and learning in your schools, districts, regions, and across the state. This year’s 6th grade will become next years 7th (and so on), which means thinking proactively about how to plan for more computers, more network capacity, more professional development, more support for instructional technology, etc., etc. This Pilot is about thinking ahead." (Oregon_1to1_Grant_Docs.doc)