School officials in Uxbridge are set to collect all the ACER C734 Chromebooks in use across the district Wednesday morning after one of the computers left a student with burns on their hands when it began smoking during MCAS testing.
A “thorough safety evaluation” of the computers will be conducted, Superintendent Michael Baldassare said in a statement Tuesday evening, noting the malfunctioning laptop was the first incident of its kind across the roughly 155,000 Chromebooks in use nationwide.
ACER, the company that manufactures the laptops, will send 450 loaner Chromebooks to the district so students can complete their MCAS testing, Baldassare said. The company is also sending a technician to Whitin Intermediate School, where the student was burned, to examine the busted computer.
“We want to make sure we evaluate what happened with this unit before we move forward” using that model, Baldassarre said.
A student at the Whitin was in the process of taking an english language MCAS exam when the laptop they were using began to emit smoke around 9:30 a.m., Baldassarre said in an earlier statement. The student’s hands were burned, and they were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment.
MCAS testing remains postponed for students in grades 4 through 6, and the district is working to reschedule testing for those students before the mandatory state deadline for completion of the exams on April 26.
“We appreciate the patience being shown by our students and parents as we work to get to the bottom of this incident,” Baldassarre said. “Things have been handled so properly and so well by everyone involved.”
