At a recent IIQ Open Office Hours, I discussed what we are doing to better manage our loaner items for students. I thought I would share that description less ephemerally here.
TLDR
Butler Tech uses hard cases rather than bags. Our cases are color coded to our school colors of blue and orange. Our loaners use a green case and our loaner chargers, are covered in green tape. Now every staff person knows that if they see a kid with a green computer or charger to send them to return those before they leave at the end of the day. Long-term loaners are not color-coded.
The loaner challenge
Butler Tech is a career tech school district. We have seven of our own buildings on four campuses. We also run classes in 40+ affiliate school district buildings. We serve primarily middle and high schoolers, but only high schoolers on our campuses. I am only addressing what we do in our buildings.
At our main high school, we operate a student-run tech support desk. This is the primary place that students go to get loaner equipment. We started this two years ago just before we moved to IIQ. We have struggled for years with never getting our equipment back. Because our students even if they are on our campuses, receive their diplomas from their home district, we have no leverage to withhold their graduation or diploma until they pay lost equipment fees.
What to do?
We identified that we needed to find a way to make sure loaners are returned promptly. Originally, we tried having students retrieve them, but they simply lack the clout of adults. We realized that our loaners fell into two categories:
- My computer is getting fixed
- I forgot
The kids who have a loaner while their computer is being fixed were really good about returning them, mostly because they wanted the machine with their stickers on it back. But the “I forgot” kids were our concern.
The loaner pool
We knew the data on what was happening to which loaners because we had used IIQ to setup a loaner pool for each building. A ticket would be generated, and the loaner issued from the appropriate spare pool. Initially, this was a problem because spares required the ticket to have an original device but after IIQ made a change in the fall, we could do it the old way for loaners during repairs or without an original device for single day use.
We still had problems getting those single day use computers and chargers back though. We had good documentation, but kids inevitably insisted they dropped it at the main office or had turned it in days ago. We needed to find a way to keep those short-term loaners in the building. The longer they were checked out, the less likely they were to return.
The solution
Butler Tech uses hard-cases on our 1-to-1 devices that are color coded blue and orange to match our school colors. We realized that we could use this to create simple visual for teachers and staff so that if they saw a kid at last bell or on their way out with an identifiable loaner, that they could be directed to return it before leaving the building. We opted for green as easy to see and in contrast to the other colors. Once we did that, we realized we could do something similar for chargers. We wrapped those in green as well.
Our problem was that there was no way to identify which charger came from which kid. Normally for things like chargers we don’t care about individual items so they are tracked via parts. However, in this case, the individual unit mattered. So we decided to treat them the same as other assets and added them to IIQ, then placed them in the loaner pool and now they are tracked the same as computers.
With both loaner computers and loaner chargers an identifiable green we have made significant progress in recovering those. We are optimistic that next year with this being the process from the start that we will do even better.
