This fall, students at South Portland High School will have new Apple laptop computers, but students at Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough high schools will not.

South Portland has purchased 990 laptops for its high school students, at a cost of about $247,000 this year, said Andrew Wallace, director of technology for South Portland schools.

“We think that one-to-one laptops will give our students a huge advantage for the workforce or college,” Wallace said. “We welcome the opportunity to have that many new computers all at the same time.”

South Portland purchased the computers at a reduced rate of $242 as part of the Maine Department of Education’s Maine Learning Technology Initiative. This initiative has provided free laptops to Maine’s seventh- and eighth-grade students since 2002.

Last month the state announced it had struck a deal with Apple to buy 64,000 laptops at the reduced rate of $242.

Maine was the first state to supply laptops to middle school students, said David Connerty-Marin, spokesman with the Department of Education. Maine is also the first to provide them to high school students, he said.

“We had tremendous success with our middle school laptop program,” Connerty-Marin said. “We see that it engages students, and it’s a great learning tool. One of the things we stress repeatedly is that it’s not just about the technology. It’s about using the laptop as an educational tool.”

Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough superintendents Alan Hawkins and David Doyle said they agreed with Connerty-Marin’s assessment, but said their school departments couldn’t afford to buy laptops for their high school students this year after both schools underwent at times tumultuous budget seasons.

“We simply couldn’t finance it,” Hawkins said about Cape’s decision not to take advantage of the plan. “I’m not happy with it, but it’s the only way we could truly feel comfortable based on the issues we had with the budget. We just did not feel this was the time we should be doing this.”

Hawkins said it would cost Cape Elizabeth about $133,000 to supply its students with the laptops under the program. Unlike the middle school program, for which the state fully pays, school districts are responsible for buying their own laptops.

The state does kick in some money for high school laptops from federal stimulus money it received, but the amount each school district receives is determined by the Essential Programs and Services funding formula, which takes into account each town’s property tax rates and school size.

For example, the formula could determine that a school department would need to come up with $200 of the cost of the $242 laptops, with the state paying the remaining $42, Connerty-Marin said. It could also be the opposite, which prevents some school districts from affording the laptops, he said.

In order for Scarborough to take part in the program, it would need to come up with about $180,000, Doyle said. Scarborough, like Cape Elizabeth, went through a difficult budget process and might make more cuts if its teacher’s union doesn’t accept a wage freeze, Doyle said.

“The timing of the whole initiative was very poor from our perspective,” Doyle said. “I told legislators that we would’ve been happy to go with the deal if it were funded like the middle school initiative.”

Scarborough also didn’t want to pursue the program because the computers are Apple, and Doyle said the district uses Microsoft PCs at the high school level, which school officials say will better prepare students for college or the workforce since more schools and businesses use PCs instead of Apple products.

Scarborough does, however, use the Apples at the middle school because they were provided by the state.

“It wasn’t something that our tax base had to fund so it made sense to go with that program,” Doyle said.

Scarborough is considering negotiating its own deal to purchase PC laptops for each student, Doyle said.

“One of the things that we will be doing this year is looking at our five-year technology plan,” Doyle said. “We will be mapping how we would like to get to one-on-one with a plan that we would be more comfortable with.”

Hawkins said Cape Elizabeth would revisit the program when the school department has enough money in its budget.

“The way I look at it is this,” Hawkins said. “If we are going to have our kids ready to work in the 21st Century … one of the skills they need to have is the use of technology.”

South Portland, Cape Elizabeth and Scarborough have all conducted surveys in the past few years that suggest about 95 percent of all high school students in the schools had computers at home.

That, Wallace said, is not enough, which is why South Portland chose to go with the state’s new program.

“We did find that a majority of our students did have computers at home,” he said. “However, that doesn’t mean they always had access to them. This program allows them to have access to the computers at all times.”

Maine has 119 high schools, and currently 65 schools have enrolled in the program, Connerty-Marin said.