Members of the Education Commission in the House of Deputies rejected on Tuesday a bill aimed at establishing the terms for Romania’s entry in the “One laptop per child” world program, which delivers special laptops to school students through governments of the world.
While the Government said it supported the bill, opposition deputies opposed it while a representative of the Education Ministry presented them an outdated governmental point of view.
House Commission head Lia Olguta Vasilescu said they believed the 700 million euro needed for the procurement of the laptops was too much an amount and would weigh heavily on the Education Ministry budget. Vasilescu also said that “beside that the laptops are simple toys, they’re not even have an expiring date”.
“We, the Parliament, do not want to support this project because there’s no money” for it, Vasilescu told HotNews.ro.
On March 13, the project was presented to PM Calin Popescu Tariceanu by the initiator of the world program himself - Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The prime minister said at the time that the bill “had an educational purpose and we afford to apply it”.
The project was planned to be applied somewhere around September 15, 2007. The Education Ministry estimated some 1.2 million children would have benefited from the program.
HotNews.ro, Mar 20, 2007
0 comments:
Post a Comment