Leslie Campbell uses a projector to teach kindergarten students at Prairie Park School how to use a computer mouse.

The children sit at computers, look at the Web site projected on the wall and follow Campbell’s mouse clicks. Without the projector, teaching kindergarten students to use a mouse would be difficult, said Campbell, librarian at the school, 2711 Kensington Road.

“You’d almost have to go to every third or fourth child and give them a little minilesson so they could teach the people on either side of them,” Campbell said. “It would be very time-consuming.”

Teachers in the Lawrence school district would get 600 new projectors if voters pass an $8.9 million bond issue question that will be on the April 5 ballot.

Prairie Park School has only one projector and it is in high demand, Campbell said. The laptops the bond issue would provide for schools would be a big help too, she said.

“Our (computer) lab is full. It’s scheduled all the time,” she said.

The school district spends about $1.7 million a year on technology, not including salaries for technicians.

The technology bond question, the lesser of two bond proposals school officials agreed Monday to place on the ballot, would give the school district:

• More than $1 million to buy 600 projectors for classrooms. Teacher use projectors to display PowerPoint presentations or Internet sites for their classes.
• More than $3.7 million to buy laptop batteries, 1,800 laptop computers and more than 100 laptop carts. The school district currently has one computer for every six students. The new laptops would reduce this ratio to one computer for every three students, said Mike Eltschinger, director of information technology services for the district.

The technology bond also would fund:

• $500,000 to upgrade computer network wiring that connects all the district’s buildings. That will protect the schools’ Internet connections from disruptive slowdowns, said Paul Dawson, assistant director of information technology services.
• Nearly $1 million to expand the capacity of the server used to store school employee and student computer files. The money also would allow upgrades to a backup server.
• $150,000 for software or equipment to allow technicians to better monitor the computer network for problems.
• $1 million to provide wireless Internet access for all classrooms and offices in the school district — about 800 rooms total.
• $1.5 million to buy student and financial records software.