Most North Carolina public schools say they don’t have the money to replace laptops issued to students in recent years — a scenario that could leave hundreds of thousands students without computers if they break down, an analysis of state data obtained by WRAL News shows.
Many of the machines were purchased using federal stimulus dollars issued during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Without new funding, the boom in laptop purchases that turned nearly every school into a “one-to-one school” — one device per student — would be a blip in time.
Most students have received Chromebooks, lower-cost devices that use web-based apps instead of traditional software programs and that once lasted just four years.
Since 2020, schools have spent $448 million in stimulus funds on computer equipment for students and staff, data maintained by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction shows.
It’s unclear where schools will get that kind of money again.
The Department of Public Instruction surveyed 301 public school systems and public charter schools from April through June. Of those, 82 public school systems and 93 charter schools said they had no funding source to replace their devices whenever they break down.
Schools recently got a bit of good luck: Google announced in November that it will provide support for Chromebooks for 10 years, instead of just four.
Most schools bought Chromebooks in 2020 and 2021. The extension provides a reprieve for many school systems that previously planned to trash the laptops once security software stopped working on them. Now as the devices age, schools are eyeing whether the hardware will last that long — especially in the hands and backpacks of children.
“If districts don't really have a tech obsolescence plan and these Chromebooks start to die down, we go back to where we were two to three years before the pandemic,” said Merve Lapus, vice president of education, outreach and engagement for Common Sense Media, which evaluates children’s use of technology and media. “We were just looking at getting reliable connectivity into our schools and our communities, and now we might have connectivity without any devices.”
Many schools are also working toward stricter bans on cellphones in classrooms, he noted. Without a smartphone or a laptop, students would have no access to technology during lessons, he said.
The laptops have brought positives and negatives for Jennifer Laabs Myers’ 12-year-old twins, but mostly positives. Some students might use them unproductively in their free time, and Laabs Myers acknowledged they are expensive.
But her son and daughter, who are rising Ligon Middle School seventh graders in Wake County, are better able to keep track of assignments and texts. And her son, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, has been able to use his laptop to explore all kinds of interests he never knew he had before: geography and geology, countries and volcanoes and tectonic plates. Their technological prowess has also taken off in ways that Laabs Myers thinks will prepare them for adulthood.
“I would have never, ever, imagined the knowledge and the interest areas,” Laabs Myers said of her son. “He wants to be a marine biologist, and he wants to go down and discover the midnight zone and really complex things. ... I really think he will be doing that stuff and he will be solving some problems of the world.”
‘It would definitely be harder’
Wake County school officials told WRAL News they’re estimating the devices will last about five years, but they acknowledged many devices are already pushing up on that time and may still be in good shape. The district is among those that haven’t identified a funding source for replacement.
“If Google had not extended the support for the operating system on these Chromebooks, we would be facing risks right now, because some of our devices have reached the age where they would no longer be supported,” said Kevin Harvey, the district’s director of inventory for technology services. “That puts our students’ data at risk. That puts our effectiveness at risk, because the devices just can't keep up when they don't get updates.”
Harvey noted all Chromebooks have covers on them. That’s worked well so far in keeping the devices from suffering too much wear and tear.
To make them last longer, schools will need to work with students on being more responsible, Lapus said.
“I’ve seen so many instances where bookbags are just thrown to the ground so they can go run to play basketball, and those bookbags then have their Chromebook inside them,” Lapus said.
Replacement parts for Chromebooks aren’t easy to find, compared to other laptops, making them harder to repair, said Lucas Gutterman, director of the Designed to Last campaign at U.S. Public Interest Research Groups. Gutterman’s organization pushed Google to increase the lifespan of Chromebooks months before the company announced its change.
“We're going to keep pushing Google and all manufacturers to actually just design tech to last,” Gutterman said, “to help save students money, but also just to reduce the electronic waste that all of this tech is producing.”
Doubling the lifespan of Chromebooks would save U.S. schools $1.8 billion, assuming no extra maintenance costs, his group estimates.
In North Carolina, schools often don’t allow younger children to take the devices home. Some school systems require high school students to pay a deposit toward potential repairs to be able to take them home.
But the devices have changed the way kids learn at school and at home. With their future in doubt, teachers may need to adjust lesson plans and students without computers at home may need to find other ways of getting homework done.
Carol Kump, a Franklin County Schools first-grade teacher, said the laptops allow her to tailor lessons for students. Students can do an assignment in an application, and Kump can use the quickly generated results to identify the student’s struggle areas and form additional assignments targeting those areas. She’d be able to readjust to life before the devices, she said, but she wouldn’t be able to tailor lessons as quickly or easily based on kids’ needs.
“It would definitely be harder, and it would be more difficult,” she said. Franklin County’s school system is also among those that haven’t identified a funding source to replace the laptops.
Laabs Myers thinks she’d be able to buy laptops for her children if the school system suddenly couldn’t afford them. But she’s worried about middle- and high-school families that couldn’t afford them. Those are the students who would benefit the most from having computers, because of essays they must write and research they must do, she said. With her children in middle school now, she can see how much more applicable the devices are to everyday learning.
“I would wonder about how kids would be able to do their homework or other assignments, especially in the older grades,” Laabs Myers said.
Going one-to-one
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, and before billions of federal dollars helped fund them, schools across the United States envisioned a future in which every student had access to a computer in school at all times.
Computers and the internet offer a host of tools that can enhance learning and make it easier for some kids to complete schoolwork. Offering a device to everyone can shrink some of the technology gaps between students who can afford the tools and those who can’t, Lapus said. But the gaps don’t disappear entirely, he said; many kids still don’t have internet access at home.
The devices are helpful as kids age into middle school and high school and have a lot more independent learning time and differing lessons.
“Having these types of tools are going to be really helpful, especially as we're preparing them for the job market and preparing them for just [living in] the community that they're already a part of,” Lapus said. Common Sense Media also advocates for schools to teach more digital literacy to kids, to help them better use the devices.
In 2020, as the federal stimulus money started coming in, the vision of one-to-one devices transformed into reality — almost. The children would have devices, but they’d have them at home, to use for remote learning. That was only for the kids who had access to the internet at home. Many who didn’t had to go find a connection or their districts delivered paper packets of schoolwork to them.
When the students returned to in-person learning by 2021, the devices came with them.
How the laptops are used has varied in other ways school system-to-school system. Some allow each student to take their laptop to and from home. Some allow that only for certain grade levels. Some allow that only for students who could pay for a deposit on the laptop. Some made the devices available only in school.
Having a portable computer for every student has changed education for many kids; they can now use online tools for classwork or homework, giving teachers more resources and speeding up grading processes. For those students who could take them home, the laptops gave them — and their families — a resource they may not have had before. Research still suggests ink and paper have power; reading comprehension is better in print than it is on a device, for example.
Lapus said laptops are best used as a tool to enhance learning but not as a main tool to learn new concepts.
Students do well learning in groups and in settings where they can talk out new concepts and “poke holes” in their understanding of something, Lapus said. Independent time with a laptop can help students practice what they’ve learned — reinforcing what they’ve learned or allowing them to explore concepts further. Online tools can also be used to assess students’ learning along the way.
“What's really most important is finding the tech or the tool that really helps to meet a specific thing you're trying to achieve and not leaning on the tech or the tools to kind of be your saving grace for instruction,” Lapus said.
What happens now
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction surveyed school systems in 2022 and found most didn’t have a future funding source once the federal money ran out. Officials found in the most recent survey that the reality hasn’t hardly changed.
With time and money running out now, schools say they don’t have another funding source for all of the laptops, although it’s possible they may have funding for some of them. The problem: They’ve never had a regular source to fund the laptops and they bought the laptops in bulk, meaning replacement could come due for all of them at the same time, rather than staggered over a few years.
In the school systems that have identified a funding source, many of them were already offering a computer to every student before the pandemic. They often used private donations to make that happen, like in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Person County Schools.
Schools receive some regular technology funding from the state and counties via revenues collected through the court systems — from fines and forfeitures connected to all kinds of cases. That funding source has been the subject of some tension. A superior court judge as recently as 2019 ordered the state to pay more than $700 million in fines and forfeitures that should have gone to K-12 schools but didn’t for over a decade.
Some lawmakers have filed bills to cover the payment, but they have not advanced to the committee stage.
Still, those back payments for technology funds would be only one-time funds, as well.
