Montgomery ISD (MISD) has an enrollment of 9,864 students with 1,660 active employees. The district is a 1:1 kindergarten through 12th grade district, with 12 school sites and five auxiliary sites. The adopted tax rate is $1.0912.
Strategies from the contributing school districts Our findings indicate that thriving districts in all circumstances are optimizing financial management and being good stewards of equipment, resources, money, time, and staff. By prioritizing projects and minimizing waste, technology departments will continue to get the most value for their money. Leveraging technology assets in strategic ways, as outlined below, will allow technology leaders to optimize their costto-value ratio.
Student device replacement — master schedule Establishing an ongoing strategy for device replacements is an additional challenge for technology departments weathering the budget crisis in Texas. Other options are being explored as we use the standard processes of re-evaluating usable device lifecycles, in-house repairs, and lowerquality replacements. One option that bears promise is strategically replacing student devices based on the percentage of necessary classroom usage for those devices. SCUCISD calls this a "needs-based 1:1" replacement. In this process, student devices remain on campus, which aids in minimizing breakage, and the devices are shifted between standard classroom environments for the highest availability possible, with fine arts and athletics instructional spaces having less availability. This dynamic reassignment of devices throughout the school day allows districts
to purchase replacement student devices based on a percentage of each campus’ student enrollment rather than a device for every student. The process minimizes the issue of idle devices found in traditional 1:1 deployments, while still meeting the core academic needs of students. As more online activity is required by students for state testing and advanced academics, districts will need to shift their expectations for the number of days within each testing window that must be devoted to testing on a given campus. Without the excess of devices in daily instruction, testing windows will need to be leveraged to provide students with the necessary opportunities to pursue college credit, demonstrate their learning on the STAAR test, or provide local district data on annual growth. MWISD is a 1:1 district with cart-based prekindergarten (PK)-6 and take-home 7-12; PK is iPad, and K-12 is Chrome (nontouch). MWISD will test touch Chrome devices for PK this upcoming school year in hopes of being Chrome-based PK-12. MWISD is three years in on attempting to have all Chrome devices be in service for a six-year lifecycle. This was initially planned when the Chrome Auto Update Expiration (AUE) went to eight years, it’s now a 10-year AUE. Devices are more likely to survive six years in the cart-based deployments versus the take-home model. Understanding this, MWISD purchases a set number of devices each year for the incoming seventh grade class; typically, this class ranges from 240260 students, so 275 devices are purchased and remain with that group of students. These student numbers hold fairly steady through freshman year and then slowly decline during the last three years of high school with the average graduation class being about 180-200 students. Devices from the original purchase of 275 that are no longer used by those students remain
with that group and replace devices that do not physically make it to graduation, whether because of unrepairable damage, damages too costly to justify, or because a device is lost or stolen. When students graduate, devices still have two to three years left on the AUE, so those devices either get moved into loaner pools, spare testing carts, replacements for other devices across the district, or sold via a buyback program with a third-party vendor (e.g., AGI, Bluum, Chromebookparts, etc.). Once the AUE is reached, any remaining devices are sold via a buyback program. Besides consistently purchasing the same amount of devices each year for incoming seventh grade students, the district replaces the devices for each of three elementary schools at one school every other year. This keeps student device purchasing consistent and allows the department to coordinate increases in purchasing staff devices and classroom technology in years in which student device purchases are reduced. CFISD is a 1:1 Lenovo Chromebook district. The district has Accidental Damage Protection (ADP) and the manufacturer’s warranty on the devices. Devices are currently on a five-year refresh cycle. The district became a 1:1 district as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Devices were delivered, enrolled, prepared, serviced, and deployed from a centralized location. Buses were used for transportation to and from schools. When students returned to campus, the department moved to another location but still operated in a centralized model: technicians on campuses hot-swapped devices and non-working devices came back to the centralized location for triage where a determination was made whether to send out the device for service or repair it (power-wash) at that location.
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