District 15 looking to spend $400,000 on more take-home laptops for older students
Palatine Township Elementary District 15 plans to spend about $400,000 to buy new laptop computers for students entering sixth grade in the 2019-20 academic season.
Deputy Superintendent Matthew Barbini said the plan is to purchase about 1,400 Chromebooks for the incoming sixth-graders, which they can bring home. It'll be the third year of what's called a "one-to-one" Chromebook initiative for grades six through eight.
Barbini said at a recent District 15 finance committee session that the projected $400,000 for the laptops would be part of an overall technology budget for 2019-20. He said the Chromebook proposal likely will go to the District 15 school board for formal consideration in March.
District 15 has built up to nearly 12,000 Chromebooks since the initiative to match every older student to a device began in 2017-18. The district spent roughly $980,000 for the initial 4,400 Lenovo Chromebooks, protective cases and warranties.
"At some point in the future, we're going to have enough for every child in the district," District 15 Superintendent Scott Thompson said. "We're pretty close right now."
District 15 has about 12,800 students in 20 schools.
When students graduate from eighth grade or depart sooner, Barbini said, the returned Chromebooks are evaluated by hand and, if considered worth keeping, are sent to the elementary schools. He said the Chromebooks for the lower grades are stored in secured carts pushed to classrooms for access by teachers and students.
"What this has done, because we have been able to repurpose, is it's allowed us to pretty much have a one-to-one student ratio in grades K through five in a shared environment," Barbini said.
District 15 is seeking requests for proposals from vendors for the Chromebooks. Administrators will make a recommendation to the school board after reviewing the proposals.
Loaded with Google's suite of apps for educational use, officials say the Chromebooks benefit students in areas such as collaboration with their peers, content creation and research.