Carmen Arace Middle School is situated in the pastoral town of Bloomfield, Conn., but four years ago it faced many of the same problems as inner-city schools in nearby Hartford: low scores on standardized tests and dropping enrollment . Then the school's hard-driving headmaster, Delores Bolton, persuaded her board to shake up the place by buying a laptop computer for each student and teacher to use, in school and at home. What's more, the board provided wireless Internet access at school. Total cost: $2.5 million. Now, an hour before classes start, every seat in the library is taken by students who cannot wait for getting online. Fifth-grade teacher Jen Friday talks about different kinds of birds as students view them at a colorful website. After school, students on buses pull laptops from backpacks to get started on homework. Since the computer arrived, enrollment is up 20%. Scores on state tests are up 35%. Indeed, school systems in rural Maine and New York City also hope to follow Arace Middle School's example. Governor Angus King had planned using $50 million to buy a laptop for all of Maine's 17,000 seventh-graders - and for new seventh-graders each fall. In the same spirit, the New York City board of education voted on April 12 to create a school Internet portal , which would make money by selling ads and licensing public school students. Profits will also provide e-mail service for the city's 1.1 million public school students. Profits will be used to buy laptops for each of the school system's 87,000 fourth-graders. Within nine years, all students in grades 4 and higher will have their own computers. Back in Bloomfield, in the meantime, most of the _ have been worked out. Some students were using their computers to visit unauthorized websites. But teachers have the ability to keep an eye on where students have been on the Web and to stop them. "That is the worst when they disable you," says eighth-grade honors student Jamie Bassell. The habit is rubbing off on parents. "I taught my mom to use e-mail," says another eighth-grader, Katherine Hypolite. "And now she's taking computer classes. I'm so proud of her!" According to the writer, students in New York City's public schools will   _  .
enjoy e-mail service in the near future make money by selling ads on websites all have their own laptops within nine years become more interested in their studies with laptops