End of Year Discussion: Student Laptops

@CMWhorton Thank you for posting this discussion! I love the layout as well 😉

I was looking forward to seeing some of the responses you will get. Let me tag some of our users to see if they will add some of their expertise 😄

@bclark @HurricaneH @MattHenry @BFB @HWeddle 133a03 msad75 @jclark16 

Any ideas or workflows to share?

Since my district is chromebook for students, and we send all students home with their devices over the summer break, there’s fortunately not much in the way of end of year/beginning of next year maintenance for already deployed laptops. 

Over the summer however, we do prep all NEW chromebooks to be deployed the next school year on a refresh cycle, which is usually eats up a fair amount of our summer’s schedule.

At the beginning of the next school year, we replace the oldest in use chromebooks with the newer devices, prepped over the summer. 

Great thread!  I’d love to hear other ideas as well.  Similarly, we’ve been contributing to the thread link below dealing with the same topic about STAFF laptops:

We do 1-to-1 similarly to what HurricaneH’s district does, thankfully. I would NOT want to collect and store all of those Chromebooks for the summer, not to mention moving entire grade levels of devices to a new school!  Our 1-to-1 students take their Chromebooks home for the summer, grades 5-11. We prep new devices for both the new 5th grade students, and for a start of school refresh/swapout for incoming 9th grade students. we do it then because that’s the halfway point; they get their first device for grades 5-8, second and last one for high school, grades 9-12. We repurpose the usable collected devices from graduates and from the /refresh swapout for various things: repair loaners, night school, testing, makerspaces, etc, usually stored in carts.

Would love to hear other strategies here  : )

Our students are 1:1 Chromebooks, but because we’re a larger district we mostly leave it up to the individual schools on how they want to handle end of year (let the students keep them over the summer vs. collection).

Some of our middle schools are part of the VILS program so they have to manage assets based on the VILS program guidelines, so they may be different.

The high schools do collect them from graduating seniors, of course.

As far as updates, we pin Chrome OS versions based on what the state mandated testing software supports, and monitor that year-round, so there’s no impact on that over the summer. Worst case is teachers and STC’s are asked to update Chromebooks in their classes prior to school starting for students when the new school year starts.

That’s interesting, jclark. We’re in a rural district with 6 schools total, less than 2K students, so very different. Some of the elementary schools allow students who will stay at that school next year to store their Chromebook & charger there for the summer, but as in your case, we don’t get involved with that, it’s up to those schools. All students 7th and above are expected to take their device home for the summer.

We don’t test in the first few weeks of school so updates are not an issue, they catch up.

Thanks for sharing! I noticed that you said ‘some of our middle schools,’ we have a combined  middle and high school, grades 7-12. Different educational environments with different needs.

We were 1 to 1 pre covid and it was a nightmare, all our chromebooks are now back in carts and our site technicians typically clean them up a bit over summer and send any outstanding repairs out. We do prep new carts over the summer for whenever we get fresh cycles of Chromebooks. The Dell 3180s went end of life this year and we have a ton of them still, so our techs are prioritizing getting those out of carts and into the surplus pile.

Thank you @HurricaneH @BFB @jclark16 @TAnders for sharing your workflows here! 

We collect all student devices (with a few exceptions, usually related to Sped students who need their device for communication purposes). 

While we have them we run a full restore and installation of the latest OS on them. We also prep the outgoing student devices to roll them down to incoming students (ie, outgoing Seniors and incoming Freshman). 

We have the same basic polices/apps that get installed but there are always a few changes we make each year at this time.

Storage wise we finally have a facility to call our won and luckily we have enough space to store them all. Sure, we could always use more space but it feels wonderful compared to past years. The devices are primarily split up by school and on a separate pallet (or pallets) per school.

This is the first year we have used the box/slot system that’s built into Rollout Scout and so far it’s working great.

6 Schools?! You must be on cloud nine! We have around 170 schools, 100k students and 200k Chromebooks to manage 😂 I’m sure you can imagine why we put some of that responsibility at the school level. Some of our high schools have about 2k students in them alone.

@BFB it’s interesting to me to see the small district perspective. Thanks for sharing as well!

We have about 5000 students and are 1 to 1 for all but PK.

• Does your students turn laptops in for the summer?
  They do! We go school to school on the last few days of the school year and collect all 5000 of them. Each school is responsible for tracking down missing devices and some of the administrators have access to IIQ this year so they can see views showing outstanding assignments.
• Do you have procedures for students needing laptops for summer programs?
  We have summer schools that require devices and we use the Asset Group feature in IIQ to group the devices heading to summer school programs. We assign the devices to the administrator in charge of summer school and they keep up with which student has which device.
• What does your end-of-the-year routine look like for organizing the summer collection of student laptops?
  A lot of Germ-X and rags… We clean every device, print new tags for the ones that have been picked off, and roll and count chargers turned in by site. This year, we used verification scanning and set the room to “ABC Collection” so we knew which school the devices came from and could easily get a count to compare to the number of chargers turned in.
  During collection, we placed device that didn’t get a charger turne din into a different color crate so that at the end of that schools collection we could easily scan those devices and export of a list of previous owners to show which students didn’t turn in a charger.
• Do you run updates on all student laptops every summer?
  They are Chromebooks so they update themselves pretty well. No need to manually run updates on the ones turned in usually.
• Do you re-image all student laptops every summer?
  They are chromebooks so they are configured to clear user profiles when we hand them back out. Then, after handout is complete, we turn that off again.
• Do you use the summer to add any new software that may be needed?
  We are actually going to roll out cloud-based virtual applications so students can use Chromebooks for things like Inventor. But we don’t roll out software in the traditional sense.
• Do you have a helpful system you use to help you organize which laptops need updates or re-imaging?
  Nope
• What does your summer storage of student laptops look like?
  About 250 red crates each storing 20 chromebooks of either Dells or Lenovos stacked in rows in our storage room. Then, about 65 black crates storing 80 chargers each stacked in the same groups. We try to keep the devices organized by school so we deploy the same ones back to the same school. It doesn’t technically matter but if one school take better care of their device we want them to get their devices back as best as possible.
  
  We’ve been doing 1 to 1 for about 12 years now and I have been apart of all of them. Every year there is always something a little different to manage but we make it work. This year was the first year we used IIQ and it went pretty well though there are some shortcomings in the way take-up works. All in all though IIQ has been the best (non homegrown) solution to date!
   

@bclark @jclark16 love to see your names and workflows in this thread!

@MattHenry Thank you so much for this detailed feedback to support your fellow community members! 

We are a rural district with around 1500 students and we have 1:1 Chromebooks and the students keep them year to year and over the summer.  It would take so much time, for us to collect and clean and then hand out the next year. We do repairs throughout the year and have loaner CB that we trade until their “assigned” CB is repaired. The TK and KG classrooms have carts but those students have CB that they leave at home. From 1st grade on, the students bring their CB to and from school, to do work at school and finish any at home.

We have “internal” insurance. We had used a company for this in the past, but it took so long to get the repairs back. We now have the insurance that we keep track of and process “claims” internally. The insurance is purely voluntary/optional since we are a public school and can’t require the families to purchase it. We currently have one person working on repairs. She does about 30 repairs a day, with some students getting their CB back in the same day.  

Our CB automatically update unless we have locked a version, then they will only update to that version. Our CB are also setup that they do not save to the CB HD, if they are turned off then any history is deleted. We are a Google school district; therefore, everyone saves to their drive. This helps with giving the loaner CB when a repair is needed, nothing is save on the CB to be moved to the loaner.  

We do collect when a student disenrolls or graduates. We then require the CB and the a/c adapter to be returned and any other technology like hotspots. Again, we cannot force them to pay for the CB or adapter or any repairs; however, the high school “threatens” (hollow threat) to keep their diploma if they don’t pay. Most will then pay. 

@mwhite When I was in school, we weren’t allowed to walk at graduation if we had any outstanding fees (library, lunch money - we were not 1:1 back then), but it was quite the motivator. Thanks for sharing your workflow! 😄

We are a large district (60+K students) that is 1-to-1.

High school students take them home over summer.

Middle school kids have to turn them in at the end of each year and we store them for summer at the schools.

Elementary stays in the classroom year round.