During an elementary literacy block in Meriden Public Schools, a teacher gathers a small group of students around a kidney-shaped table. Across the room, other students read aloud to Diya, the animated reading partner inside Google Read Along. The tool listens, encourages, helps with unfamiliar words, and gives each child time to practice at an appropriate pace.

At the end of the session, the teacher can see each student’s accuracy, reading rate, comprehension, and active practice time. Technology has not replaced the teacher. It has created more space for the teacher to provide the instruction only a skilled educator can give.

That is the Meriden story. For sixteen years, this Connecticut district has built a thoughtful approach to educational technology around access, relationships, and opportunity.

Superintendent Dr. Mark Benigni knows the community personally. He grew up in Meriden, attended its public schools, served as the city’s mayor, and has spent sixteen years leading the district that educated him. His children graduated from Meriden Public Schools, as did many members of his leadership team.

Meriden serves approximately 8,330 students in a working-class city between Hartford and New Haven. About 81% qualify for free or reduced-price meals. Around 20% receive special education services, and another 20% are multilingual learners. Some students live in homes without reliable broadband access.

For Meriden, technology access has never been about acquiring the newest device. It has been about ensuring every student has the tools needed to learn, communicate, and prepare for the future.

That commitment became clear when the district experimented with Bring Your Own Device. Some students arrived with MacBooks. Others had only a phone, sometimes with a cracked screen, and some had no device at all. Meriden chose a different path.

Over sixteen years, its one-to-one program has evolved from iPads to tablets, laptops, and now Chromebooks. Each transition reflected feedback from students, teachers, and the technology team. The devices changed. The commitment to access did not.

Today, every K–12 student receives a district-issued Chromebook. Every elementary student also attends a weekly Genius Lab, where technology skills, coding, creativity, and digital citizenship are part of the curriculum.

In those labs, kindergartners explore with programmable robots. Older students create with Scratch, solve problems, and sometimes help younger classmates debug their work. Technology is woven into how students learn to think, create, and collaborate.

The district’s literacy work offers one of the clearest examples of what purposeful technology can make possible.

Google Read Along gives students repeated opportunities to practice reading aloud while teachers work with small groups. Its multilingual capabilities are especially valuable in a district serving many multilingual learners.

“Our multilingual learners are now equipped with a personal tutor who communicates with them in their preferred language,” said Susan Moore, Meriden’s director of instructional technology and curriculum, “as they strengthen skills in English and their native language.”

Meriden has also invested deeply in its educators.

Teachers can apply to become “I’m Charged” educators through a six-stage professional learning framework. The newest version supports teachers as they move from exploring artificial intelligence to modeling AI literacy, personalizing instruction, and redesigning assignments thoughtfully.

Teachers who earn the designation place a sign outside their classroom. The message is both recognition and invitation: meaningful work is happening here, and colleagues are welcome to learn from it. That culture of recognition inspired the title of this chapter.

Sixteen years of consistent work have produced meaningful results. Meriden now has seven Connecticut Blue Ribbon Schools and five Schools of Distinction for the second consecutive year. The district reports a 71% reduction in suspensions and a 96% reduction in expulsions since 2010. Meriden has also received CoSN’s District Team Leadership Award, and Benigni was named the 2020 AASA and CoSN Digital Superintendent of the Year.

Ask Benigni what makes him proudest, however, and he does not begin with the awards. “The success of our students,” he says. “It’s working.”

Meriden’s success is not built on technology alone. Classrooms still include books, pencils, conversations, guided reading groups, movement, and hands-on learning. Technology earns its place when it helps teachers respond more precisely to students, expands access, encourages creation, or prepares young people to navigate the digital world responsibly.

As Moore puts it, turning an ordinary worksheet into a digital worksheet does not transform learning. The question is always how the tool advances what students are able to do.

Meriden Public Schools has spent sixteen years answering that question. Its answer can be seen in a multilingual learner practicing with a patient reading partner, a child cheering when an Ozobot follows the code she created, and a teacher opening the classroom door so colleagues can learn from what is working.

Recognize the tools, but more importantly, recognize the people who use them with care.

Read the complete Meriden Public Schools story in Purposeful Technology, Powerful Learning: You Can’t Ban Possibility, by Stacy Hawthorne, Ed.D., CETL. ® Coming this September 2026. Learn more here. 

Published August 13, 2026

AUTHOR: Dr. Stacy Hawthorne, CETL serves as the Chair of the CoSN Board of Directors and Executive Director of the EdTech Leaders Alliance.

CoSN is vendor neutral and does not endorse products or services. Any mention of a specific solution is for contextual purposes.