Why More Schools Are Breaking Away from In-House Device Management

“We are blessed to have a large staff compared with a lot of school districts, but everyone is extremely busy,” Prause says. “We’re always looking to save seconds with device management to free people up to work on other things.”

The district contracts with its technology suppliers to take on certain time-consuming tasks. Working with companies such as CDW and GTS Technology Solutions, the district outsources everything from asset tagging and engraving to device enrollment in its endpoint management systems.

Device cart preparation is also typically included among the services the suppliers provide, as is basic device preparation. “The idea is that when devices get to campus, they’re ready to go into people’s hands,” Prause says. “And that way, our technicians can be training and helping students and staff directly and preparing the campuses for the beginning of the school year.”

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Wisconsin School Gets Student Help Managing Devices

At Leander, in addition to outsourcing jobs to suppliers, the technology team takes advantage of extended warranty programs from vendors to have broken devices repaired in bulk.

“We ship them out over the summer and get them back good as new before school starts,” Prause says. “It lets our team focus on the devices they need to repair, the ones that are out of warranty.”

Leander ISD also has a robust student tech program at its secondary school campuses where students repair devices during the school year.

Elsewhere, districts are tapping internal resources to find creative solutions to their workload problems. That was the approach taken by the IT team when Sarah Radcliffe was a technology coach at Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District in Wisconsin, and it’s the approach she’s taking again now that she’s executive director of educational technology at the School District of Altoona.

With its six elementary schools, one middle school, and a high school with about 5,000 students, Chippewa Falls went one-to-one about 10 years ago, Radcliffe says. It started its Chromebook rollout at the high school before expanding the program to include the entire district.

“With all the grades put together, we had 5,000 more devices than we had before,” says Radcliffe, who was tasked with running the program. “The problem was, we had only three technicians. Something had to give.”

For the first couple of years, the district contracted with insurers, packaging broken devices and mailing them out for repair. But Radcliffe eventually soured on that approach. “I was taking in devices, writing tickets, boxing devices up and unboxing them when they came back,” she says. “I felt like a shipping and receiving clerk instead of a technology coach.”

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She and her colleagues knew there had to be a better way, and they eventually found it right in front of them.

“We visited another school that had a student repair team, so we decided to try that in our district too,” she says, noting that they started with a couple of students they knew had an interest in tinkering with devices.

Today, device repair is offered as a class, and it regularly fills with more than a dozen high school students who learn the basics of customer service and analyzing and fixing Chromebooks. At Altoona, the program is slightly different — two paid student interns do the work — but it’s equally important to the small district’s ability to keep up with the needs of its 1,900 students.

“If we didn’t rely on students for help, my one technician would probably do nothing but repair Chromebooks all day,” Radcliffe says. “This frees him up to be working on other things that take planning and require more expertise.”

District Staff Improves Chromebook Management with Outsourcing

Another K–12 leader with no interest in going back to hands-on Chromebook repairs is Chantell Manahan, director of technology at Metropolitan School District of Steuben County in Indiana. While the district previously did just that — a process Manahan describes as “a hassle” — today, it contracts with a third-party service that does pickup and delivery on a weekly basis.

With about 2,600 students across six schools, MSDSC has been one-to-one for about nine years. The technology team has grown over that time from five at the start to its present seven, but there have never been enough people on staff to fully cover device management on their own.

The district’s solution, according to Manahan, has been to rely on a kind of hub-and-spoke model for Chromebook assignment and collection. “We distribute devices to our school media centers, and they take over from there,” she explains. When a device needs work, the student returns it to that same media center, and a staff member does an initial round of troubleshooting. “They can fix a lot of issues on the spot, but for any devices that need real repair, a person drives around in a van and picks them up.”

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The Chromebooks are brought to a central location where a district technician serves as a “second line of defense,” Manahan says. About half of the devices are fixed immediately and sent back to the media centers and their respective owners, and the rest are collected by the outside service. One week later, the repaired devices are returned, and a new batch of broken Chromebooks takes their place.

“As a system, it works really well because it’s so easy,” Manahan says. “It’s also reliable, and there are no boxes or postage, which means there’s no extra work for us.”