The district is looking at adding an additional staff member to fill the gap, and the resources to hire another full-time employee are in the technology budget, but it is difficult to find someone with the right skill set who is willing to do the work and will stay on with the district in the long term.
"People with those skills have lots of options, and school districts just don't typically pay what the private sector does," Superintendent Rick Hilderley said. "So finding the right person is a challenge, and you combine that with the fact that we've almost doubled or tripled our devices in the last two years, then it just bogs down his (Deven Knight, director of technology services) department a lot."
When students went home last year with their devices, many of them did not return their Chromebooks at the end of the school year.
"We just didn't do a great job last year because in emergencies we had to respond quickly with devices, and tracking our devices was a secondary priority. So if we had time to track them, we did, but in some cases, we didn't have time to track our assets," Hilderley said. "So we have devices that we know exist that aren't in our possession, and we don't know exactly how many they are or in what condition they're in and we're probably not going to know that until the school year starts.
The budget committee recently approved the purchase of 300 new Chromebooks, and Knight is tasked with getting those devices up and running and assigned to students as well.
"So we've got 300 new. We have our Chromebooks that we have in our possession and then we have a stack of several hundred that are in different states of disrepair, and then we have this phantom number of devices that are in the hands of students and families that didn't get turned in at the end of last year and that's the part that's hard to figure out — OK how many are there, how many are going to come back, what needs to be repaired? And with his lack of manpower how are we going to address it?" Hilderley said.
Students in seventh thorugh 12th grades are given their own device, which can travel to and from the school with them.
"We're committed to our one-to-one initiative, which has been going on for probably 10 years," Hilderley said.
In third through sixth grades, there are classroom sets of devices. Each device is specifically assigned to a particular student. The schools do not allow the devices to travel back and forth from school to home to reduce the need for repairs.
In the K-2 program, there are tablets for kids to interact with, which also stay at the school.
Although Knight is stretched thin and is wondering if he can pull off the beginning of the school year having all students with devices in hand, Hilderley is confident that the work will be accomplished in time.
"Deven's very cautious, and I respect that about him. But I feel OK about it. I think that we'll have an adequate number of people that show up day one and have their Chromebook in hand, and that will give us the padding we need to make sure we have everyone with a device," Hilderley said. "We need it for a couple of reasons. We have a lot of digital resources in our curriculum that require kids to engage with online products and then we need to be ready if there's a reason whether it's quarantine or some kind of a shutdown where we have to go to distance learning again. We just want to make sure students have devices to receive the curriculum and instruction."
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