End of Year Discussion: Staff Laptops

We collect our staff Macs but we don’t keep them. In fact tonight is night 1 of 2 of doing this. After school is out we will collect elementary staff MacBooks tonight, re-image/update the operating system on them all, and send them back to their buildings the next morning. Tomorrow we will repeat with secondary staff. It’s a long couple of nights but the goal is minimum downtime for the staff. 

We run reports out of iiQ to give to the staff in the buildings so they know which ones to pick up but we don’t scan them in or anything. Any who get missed have a bit of grace time and then they will lose access to wifi because their wifi passwords expire after a year (maybe 13 months but close enough). That usually gets them in pretty quick when that happens.

Somewhere in the middle of all that our department will also image, but it’s usually just a case of “as there is time”.

Our staff keeps their laptops though-out the summer.  The only staff who return their laptops are those who are leaving the district which go through a scheduling process to get those returned so they can get reimaged for new staff coming in.  All new updates and apps are pushed out automatically and that process occurs throughout the entire year.  We normally only reimage staff devices when there are major issues with the device.  Our staff gets new devices every four years through a refresh.

This is how I feel today.

Yes I have the pacifier, its been that kind of week.

@Cozmo03 @bclark filled me in on how your week is going! Keep up the good work, lad! 

@mcsdwes Do you find those devices damaged at the beginning of the school year, since teachers are taking them home? We were only allowed to keep ours if we were teaching summer school. 

@Kathryn Carter - We don’t see alot of devices that are damaged during the summer and the ones that are put in tickets during their pre-planning week so those devices will get fixed before school starts or they will get a replacement device.

We allow the staff to keep them in the summer if they choose too.  Updates are pushed out during the year so we do not worry too much for that.  Next summer we may collect them to upgrade to windows 11, but we will cross that bridge when it comes!

We collect all teacher devices at the end of the year. The only teachers who do not turn theirs in are the teachers doing summer school. All Administrative Staff keep their laptops and we schedule time with them to update/refresh their laptops during the summer.

We have updates going on throughout the year via InTune, but still prefer to collect them so we have control over the devices so we can verify updates and push new software for the upcoming school year. It also allows us to clean them up, relabel them if necessary and it helps with the inevitable summer turnover of incoming and outgoing staff.

We are fairly new to iiQ and just recently discovered Batch Check In/Out….what a game changer for us!

Thank you @MT_Jim @corycantu13 for adding your thoughts here! Love hearing all the different work flows our districts come up with!

@mcsdwes I love that you have a plan of attack for pre-planning week!

Our district follows the exact same policy.  Seems to work nicely and create minimum stress and craziness as the wind-down occurs.  

We run an imaging kiosk over the summer, which gives the staff some flexibility for when to get their laptop reimaged. The kiosk is staffed for about 3 hours each weekday, starting in July and ending in August before teachers are expected to return for the fall.

Staff have the option to drop off their laptop with their school’s office on the last day of school. The tech assigned to the building will then collect the laptops and transfer them to our main tech office/storage location. Historically, about 1/3 of the staff opt for this and then they pick up their laptop once the kiosk is open.

We ask staff to return their laptops in their laptop bags when possible, as this allows for easier storage and organizing. We attach a tag to the bag’s strap and organize alphabetically. If they do not have a bag, we collect the laptop only; again, allowing for easier storage. We can then stack the laptops alphabetically.

The laptops are generally ready to be picked up by the following day, but staff have the option to pick them up anytime before the kiosk closes for the summer.

Thank you @HurricaneH and @meyeral for sharing your workflows!

Our staff keep their laptops over summer, unless they are moving to a new school for the next school year, then they need to turn them in to the site technician and get a new one from their new school when they return from break. Our laptops are meant to be Desktop replacements, so they stay at the site they were issued to.

@TAnders We did something similar in my old district. Thanks for sharing 😄