The Nampa School District will partner with some high tech business and education groups to turn Lone Star Middle School into an HP Spotlight School.

Superintendent Paula Kellerer joined leaders from Idaho Business for Education, HP, and Digital Promise Global during Tuesday’s announcement in downtown Boise. They said the partnership will focus on technology and personalized student learning.

Lone Star is the second school in the country to be featured as a Spotlight School. As part of the program, Lone Star will receive a suite of technology hardware and software called an HP learning studio, said Stefani Pautz, Digital Promise Global’s project director for Reinvent the Classroom. The exact nature of the studio is still being personalized for Lone Star, but it is likely to include media production, digital fabrication and virtual reality technology.

The Spotlight School designation sprang in part from HP and IBE’s newly released “Statewide Study on Education and the Economy in Idaho,” which was based on interviews and surveys of nearly 2,000 Idahoans. Gus Schmedlen, HP’s vice president for worldwide education, said the Spotlight School partnership allows the findings, theories and experiments from the study to be tested and evaluated in an Idaho-setting.

“The idea is to create evidence-based models that other schools can replicate, hence the spotlight,” Schmedlen said.

Kellerer welcomed the partnership.

“For our students, this is an amazing opportunity,” Kellerer said. “But for our teachers it gives us an opportunity to give back to all schools we went to see when we begin dreaming of what personalized learning could look like in our schools.”

Several of the partners will visit Lone Star on Wednesday to go over the school’s specific technology needs, and then make an announcement to the staff, Potter said. After that, the partners will work with HP to deliver the software and technology to the school. A community-wide kickoff could be staged in the coming months.

HP’s other Spotlight School is William F. Halloran School No. 22 in Elizabeth, N.J.