Hey, so have you been wondering what's happening with the education market and Apple's campaign to regain the ground it lost to Dell? Because we have. Not a lot, mind you-- it's not like the subject consumes our every waking thought and then bleeds unbidden into our dreams while we slumber. (At least, not every night.) But since the education tussle was so central to the Apple-Dell rivalry a few years back ("Dell is now number one in education"/"no you're not, Apple still is," etc.), it's something we like to check in on every once in a while.

The good news is that, during Apple's last quarterly earnings conference call, the company announced a 10% boost in unit sales and an 18% boost in revenues in the education market, which is a nice step up. There was a recent setback, however, when Apple's single biggest and highest-profile education sale stumbled on its path to growth. Surely you remember the state of Maine leasing over 38,000 iBooks to supply one to every single seventh- and eighth-grader living within its borders, right? Well, then you probably also recall the massive budget struggle that almost nixed the deal before it was finalized. Eventually smarter heads prevailed, the kids got their iBooks, the whole program was a rousing success that attracted visitors from schools all over the world, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Until, of course, Maine tried to extend its massively successful junior high iBook initiative into its high schools. On Tuesday the Associated Press reported that the Maine Legislature's education committee had decreed that the program "will not be expanded into high schools this fall," and "offered little hope that the governor's proposal... could be salvaged." How little hope? Well, as committee co-chair Glenn Cummings put it, "as it stands now, the expansion to the high schools is dead, at least for this coming fall." That sounds pretty final to us.

But don't pity the high school students going iBookless just yet; the Portland Press Herald reports that Apple and supporters of the plan are thinking differently about the matter. Since the problem, as usual, is funding, apparently "Apple, the laptop supplier, is willing to rent laptops to school districts and defer payments for a year," by which time the school systems will be receiving "$175 per student for technology" through something called "Essential Programs and Services" which kicks in when the 2005-2006 school year rolls around. So technically, schools could rent iBooks for their ninth-graders to continue their iBooking ways even without having the state funding available, which would then put pressure on the Maine legislature to approve the money next year. Pretty sneaky, sis.

Here's hoping this end-run around the legislature works, because becoming a freshman in high school is plenty traumatic enough without having one's iBook pried forcibly from one's sweaty, twitching fingers. Oh, won't somebody please think of the children?