White Plains High School Goes Super High-Tech, Drops Traditional Books
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) - A high school in Westchester has gone book free to help students lighten their loads.
As CBS 2's Cindy Hsu reported, Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains went digital at the start of this school year.
Instead of students lugging around heavy textbooks for each class, they are now required to have a laptop or tablet.
Through the school's digital library, students can access all 40 textbooks from their lightweight computers.
Students said it's nice having all their books available at their fingertips.
"We don't have to carry around textbooks anymore and we can just access them wherever we are," Kyle Mastoloni, a high school junior, told Hsu.
Nicholas Dadario said his backpack was so packed with books last year, he could barely zip it up.
"When I got home, I decided to take a scale and weigh it and it was like in between 35 and 40 pounds," he told Hsu.
Without all those books, he said there's no more back pain involved with going to school.
"Under 10 pounds, all I have is my laptop," Dadario said.
Since every textbook is now digital, they're available anytime to any student in the school. The e-books are also constantly updated, so there are no more outdated textbooks.
There's also a financial plus, Hsu reported.
Students would normally need to buy seven textbooks a year at a cost of up to $700. But access to the new digital library costs $150 a year.
On Wednesday, New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan got a firsthand look at the cutting edge technology at the school.
"Now you have to realize technology for me is a ballpoint pen," said Dolan. "But this is phenomenal though."
Archbishop Stepinac students said this is what's going on in colleges across the country so they feel ahead of the game.
The school is now working on getting more charging stations throughout the school so everything stays powered up.
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