It goes without saying: The pandemic forced a lot of districts to quickly adapt and implement new strategies with little time to assess the situation.
According to several tech experts, this was especially the case surrounding device and inventory management.
As schools adopted remote instruction, digital equity became the focus for many districts. Ensuring each and every student had access to educational materials from home was key to mitigating disruptions in student learning.
Thankfully, schools have returned for what is expected to be the first year of normalcy. But what happened to all those devices schools lent to students during the pandemic?
The challenges of 1:1
Dr. Kenneth Thompson, chief information officer at San Antonio Independent School District, says moving to 1:1 was essential to ensuring every student had access to equitable learning. However, students struggled to keep up with their devices during the pandemic.
“During COVID, our superintendent at the time wanted devices to stay with the babies,” he says. “But think about it. That was a two-year span in which we didn’t touch those devices. They were in the hands of the students. And with that, bad things happen. They do things with them. They lose them. A bus runs over them. Their dog eats them.”
According to Thompson, the district started working on getting tabs on their devices in May. Fortunately, he says, they’re 85 to 90% finished. As for the remainder of the devices, he says, they’ve been discovered in some interesting places.
“Now, full transparency, I think some of these devices are in pawn shops,” he says. “We’ve had a couple of calls from overseas that they were over there. Yes, we’re struggling with that.”
Some devices, he believes, are crammed in the back of classroom closets only to be brought back out for testing.
Distributing tens of thousands of devices to students is a major challenge to take on, according to Chief Technology Officer at Portland Public Schools Don Wolff. In a district of about 45,000 students, Wolff says they use a program to help them keep track and report the status of their devices all at once.
“When we have 100,000 devices out there, trying to keep track of those—and they’re mobile devices and they’re intended to be mobile devices—they move all over the place,” he says. “This last year we went to a 1:1 deployment in grades 3-12. We ended up buying 34,000 devices to support that.”
“We’ve adopted a program called 1:1 manager. It provides a 1:1 and it gives insights to the schools so they can help manage the devices for students on their campus. They can tab what devices are being repaired and who has the devices, and it creates a 1:1 correlation between a student ID and the device serial number so we know who has each and every device.”
It also allows them to view where the device is located, repair history, breakage history, and more.
“That has helped us streamline, giving us reporting capabilities that are just built in as opposed to things we had to pull out and create the reports for ourselves.”
Most notably, Wolff says it’s been even more difficult to keep school staff accountable for their devices than students. “We have about a 10 to 15% turnover in positions, not necessarily staff leaving,” he explains. “People take different roles in different buildings. The policy to leave your device behind and get the new device at the new school gets a little wonky.”
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Some would say device management during the pandemic was “organized chaos.” This was true for Chief Technology Officer at Fresno Unified School District Tami Lundberg, whose district has had remarkable success ensuring equitable learning for its students.
“Like many districts, we went 1:1 in 2020,” Lundberg says. “We tried to coordinate 110 different sites, different schools, different locations, to be able to use the same process to check out laptops to students. There was all kinds of confusion. ‘We didn’t get that device… I don’t know what you’re talking about…’ That kind of thing.”
The district utilizes an inventory management system called Destiny, which is also used for textbooks, musical instruments and laptops.
“We also have a tool that tells us what students are using individual devices as a secondary check of our inventory,” she notes. “That’s actually been a very valuable thing for us to make sure that we have good solid inventory management.”
Lundberg spoke of the success her district has had in ensuring early on that students had access to learning materials at all times. She credits this to having a steady refresh cycle.
“We made the investment many years ago to create a refresh that allows us to make sure we have a budget on an annual basis built-in for student devices,” she says. “We have an 88% free and reduced lunch population—we’re a high poverty district. So we’re certainly using funding that we get in that regard to provide students who otherwise wouldn’t have the ability to have either laptops or maybe internet connect at home to make sure they have equitable educational resources.”
For many districts, though, sustainability is often a struggle. According to Thompson, COVID relief funds have helped tremendously in having the district ready to go 1:1 by the first day of school. But what happens once those funds run out?
“Now the question becomes sustainability,” he says. “They helped us last year. They helped us the year before. Now that we’re in this place, how do we maintain this refresh?”
So, how can districts ensure devices are kept in the student’s hands? Dr. Thompson says, “You need to touch those devices on an annual cycle.”
“We’re trying to do a regular rhythm. COVID was its own special cycle. It was a two-year window that we didn’t touch them and they were in the students’ hands. In terms of best practices, we wouldn’t have done that. But we were in a special time and we did what we had to do to provide every opportunity we could for the students here.”
Wolff, like many other districts, says they’re trying to break away from the seemingly laidback habits surrounding device forgiveness.
“It doesn’t help that our community and our buildings seem to treat these devices as if they’re not a long-term resource but a short-term commodity,” Wolff says. ‘”If one goes missing, I can just ask for another one.’ I mean that’s what the pandemic has set us up for, and we’ve kind of bought into it. Students have to have devices, so if you can’t find it here’s another device to make sure that student remains connected and has access. And we’re trying to unwind that and pull that back a little bit.”
