Already considered a 1-to-1 district — a computing device for every student in a third grade and above — the school system now has 60,000 computers in stock for about 40,000 students — including all grades.
Of those devices, more than 52,000 are Chromebooks. And, with the latest nearly $4 million purchase, that stock is expanding yet again.
Although built to be sturdy, the pandemic has put these devices to their greatest test yet.
They used to almost never be taken out of school buildings. But, since COVID-19, they routinely go home. In fact, about 12,000 students are using Chromebooks exclusively from home.
Last summer, there was a modest increase of about 10 percent to 15 percent in breakages for the laptops that were sent home last spring after the pandemic started, Chief Technology Officer Amy Jones said. She's expecting that number to grow, because using laptops at home offered fresh ways to bust them.
"Some leave them in their book bag on top of their car when they drive away," Jones said.
Terrica Jamison, who as director of technology resources oversees the district's Chromebooks inventory, also remembers fights at home between siblings over who would get to use the computer that led to broken Chromebooks.
Laptop cases, which the school system purchased for its new laptops, were helpful to an extent but also returned coated with food and drink, Jamison said.
Tens of thousands of laptops that have been in use all school year are scheduled to be collected this week from schools across Baton Rouge; Thursday is the last day of school for students. School-level personnel do the initial check on the condition of these laptops and, if necessary, submit repair tickets.
Repairs of Chromebooks will continue all summer. Laptops that are less than a year old can be repaired via warranty, but the rest are repaired in house by a dedicated repair team. Parts pulled from laptops of yesteryear help fix newer ones.
"We salvage the keyboards, the top covers, everything that we can use," Jones said.
Some damaged laptops, though, are a lost cause.
"We call them 'damaged beyond repair,' write them off the district inventory and send them to Sharp Station for auction," Jones said.
The Capitol Area Corporate Recycling Council in Baton Rouge has accepted district Chromebooks in the past for reuse, but once sold at auction, these clunkers tend not to be reused.
"They buy them for scraps and parts," Jones said.
Unlike some of its neighboring school districts, East Baton Rouge does not charge students a user fee for the use of take-home laptops as a way of paying for their upkeep.
The school district, however, does reserve the right to issue fines for damage caused by students that is "beyond normal wear and tear." The biggest fine is $200 for laptops that are totaled. That's meant to cover the cost of buying a new laptop, though the price of a new Chromebook has gone up to $220.
The nerve center of the school system's Chromebook operation is at two large buildings located at 3000 N. Sherwood Forest Drive. One of the buildings is a warehouse for the school system's Child Nutrition Program, housing rows upon rows of food and kitchen supplies. Now, the warehouse also houses thousands of Chromebooks.
It's the latest base of operations for the district's Department of Technology Services. Jones said she'd love to have a more permanent home.
"We are waiting for the day when Technology can get its own building so we are not borrowing space all over town," Jones said. "I keep floating it. One day it will stick."
Years ago, when Jones started, laptops in schools were rare.
"You might have had a school cart with 30 laptops if a school could afford it," she recalled.
That slowly changed over time, but it wasn't until 2016 when the school system shifted decisively from desktops to laptops. That summer, it purchased nearly 13,000 Chromebooks for grades five to eight as part of a goal to make laptops as widespread as textbooks. Districts across Louisiana were doing the same in order to comply with Louisiana's dramatic shift to online standardized testing.
Chromebrooks became the go-to purchase for schools all over the state. With little native memory, these laptops rely on constant internet connections to access Google Chrome-based applications developed for the classroom. The laptops account for two-thirds of all the computing devices in use in Louisiana public schools.
The pandemic has sent demand for Chromebooks into overdrive, prompting widespread shortages and deliveries. To minimize such a problem, East Baton Rouge Parish opted to place early its latest order for 15,000 Chromebooks supplied by the manufacturer ASUS. Pallets of the new laptops began arriving in March, and they are still coming — another 3,000 or so are still scheduled to arrive.
Working in shifts, employees have been steadily unboxing these new Chromebooks at a clip of 1,000 a week and painstakingly readying them for use in the classroom. This process includes activating their individual Google licenses, which now cost $32, up from $25 previously.
These new devices are replacing thousands of the original 2016 laptops made by ACER. These laptops have completed five full years of use, making them ancient in the short shelf life of computers.
The inaugural laptops are being phased out because Google will no longer update their software. They won't disappear right away, though. Jones's office earlier this year urged schools to hang onto them — at least the ones in good condition — so that the school system can weather any future shortages "due to heavy strain on the Chromebook manufacturing industry.
"These devices can still be used as spares for classroom assignments," according to the alert.
©2021 The Advocate, Baton Rouge, La. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
