Spokane Public Schools’ new laptop checkout policy ‘not going well’ as district faces inventory woes

In his own self-assessment, Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Adam Swinyard gave his district a failing grade for how they’ve handled a new policy for issuing school laptops.

“We gave it a 4 out of 10,” Swinyard told the school board at a recent meeting. “We’re used to 9s and 10s, so we don’t love that.”

In a bid to save money, the district this year is pivoting from a COVID-era practice in which every high school student automatically received a laptop to use at home and at school. Instead, the district planned to supply classrooms with computers to use during class. Students who needed a laptop for homework, according to the plan, could receive one upon request.

That’s not quite how it panned out for students in the first weeks of the school year.

“There’s some time associated with getting settled in that is customary to any type of thing we check out to kids, but it’s not going well,” Swinyard said. “We’re going to get our arms wrapped around it.”

In the traditional back-to-school scramble, there aren’t enough computers to go around. School spokesman Ryan Lancaster said “for the most part,” each student has a computer to use at school, but inventory is still too low to rent them for use at home.

Part of that low inventory is because about 9% of high school students did not return their school-issued laptop from the last year, Lancaster said. Still more computers are being repaired or updated by the district’s technology team, which is responsible for the annual upkeep of around 40,000 devices used by students and staff at schools.

Administrators anticipate that by early October, enough laptops will be ready for students to take home if needed.

“Kids who need computers will have access to computers; I know that that’s a misnomer that’s out there,” said Deputy Superintendent Heather Bybee. “But they’re just building the process for that, and so they’re feeling confident in where we’re headed; it’s just going to take us a couple weeks.”

Swinyard said the rollout has gone as expected logistically, but he said there isn’t enough understanding as to why the district made the change they did.

It boiled down to cost, he said. In the previous one-computer-for-every-student model, 30% of kids were turning their computers on at home, according to a tracking software on the school-issued laptops.

“Why would we check out a device to a kid to carry home when they’re not taking it home,” Swinyard said. “That’s just more things to keep track of, that’s wear and tear on the device, it doesn’t make sense for it to leave the school.”

Further, when middle schoolers last year transitioned away from the one-to-one model, the district found a near 90% reduction in lost and damaged laptops, Bybee said.

“We noticed the damage issues were pretty big when kids were taking them home,” said Chris Lougheed, a hardware repair specialist at the school district. The two most frequent repairs are replacing screens and hardware issues stemming from the power port, he said.

Some high schoolers aren’t excited about the change. Rowan Norris, a freshman at Lewis and Clark, called the new policy “unfair.” She’s planning to buy her own computer for schoolwork, as she has limited access to her mom’s computer at home.

“I feel it’s unfair that this is facilitating the ability for certain kids to have better opportunities than other kids, simply because they can afford something, and I don’t like that,” she said.

Computer access is just about required for success at school, students said. PowerPoint presentations, typing essays, research, “basically everything,” Rowan said, requires a computer. Many kids have their own and bring it to school, as was the case even when every kid had a school-issued laptop.

Shadle Park sophomores Rylenn Fleury and Ryker Becker said they preferred the one-to-one model. Using computers at school eats up class time, Fleury said, and her teachers are using a lot more paper-based tools to teach.

While they each have a computer to use at home, Becker said he prefers to have a school-issued laptop to do homework.

“You’d get ahead of homework assignments, you could work on essays, and you’d get, like, extended time to do so,” he said.

As technology staff collect outstanding laptops and repair and update the stacks of them around the district’s tech warehouse, a process that includes baking the devices at a low temperature for six hours to kill any bed bugs, more will begin to “trickle in” to high schools for kids to rent upon request.

District administration said they’d continue to work with school principals to best communicate with students and families, including establishing a check-out process when there are enough computers .

“We’re still confident that the modeling we’ve done based on the data from past years, we’re going to be able to meet the technology needs in the classroom during the school day, while at the same time meet the needs of the kids who need to check one out,” Swinyard said.