Talk about making lemonade out of lemons.

The Buckeye Valley school district made news last month when hundreds of BV students missed school due to likely cases of H1N1 flu. The unusually high level of flu-related absences attracted media attention prompting district superintendent John Schiller to joke at the time that he should have hired an agent considering how much he was on TV.

Representatives from the Tri-Rivers Education Computer Association (TRECA) saw those stories and called BV, which had been trying to set up a program to provide sick students with laptops to take home to help them keep connected with the school. TRECA, an organization that provides technological support to BV and other schools, had extra laptops with mobile Internet cards built in, and was trying to launch a similar pilot program.

And thus, the Student Homework Initiative Engaging Learning and Discovery (SHIELD) program was born.

“H1N1 kind of brought (SHIELD) about… it’s definitely a positive out of a negative,” said BV technology director Cathy Holewinski.

Under the pilot program, students who are unable to attend class get a netbook to take home. Each student and their family can use the computers to communicate directly with their teachers, as well as access an online summary of classroom activities and daily assignments. Students can then continue to borrow the computers as they get caught up on their work.

TRECA gave the district 50 ultra-compact “netbook” computers for the SHIELD pilot program. Administrators placed five computers in seven classrooms at the middle school and the high school, and five more at each school’s library for students to check out.

The netbooks are free of charge to the district for the duration of 2009/10 school year, when the pilot program ends unless BV chooses to extend it.

BV is the first district to test the program; if it is successful, TRECA hopes to lease laptops to other districts across the state, TRECA chief informational officer Jenny Hooie said.

The netbooks have built-in wireless Internet cards, which allow students without broadband access (as is the case in some more rural, northern areas of the county) to access the Internet anywhere.

Holewinski said the availability of laptops has other potential uses — one student athlete has borrowed a laptop so she could do her homework on the bus.

“It’s a way to extend the learning beyond the normal classroom,” she said.

Nick Lyons, 12, said he thought the availability of tiny netbooks at school was cool. Nick, a seventh grader at Buckeye Valley Middle School, likes the computers’ compactness and portability.

“I think it’s great you can take a computer so you don’t have to carry all your papers home,” he said.

atobias@delgazette.com