iPad originally uploaded by Sean MacEntee
According to this Pioneer Press article, ISD 192 is asking families to pony up to $56/yr ($28/student for up to two students per family) to insure school-owned iPads from damage. While the school will cover the costs for students on reduced lunch programs, families already strapped for cash have to come up with additional dollars which really should have been covered by the district.
From the article:
Districts across the state are putting expensive technology in students’ hands to replace textbooks, workbooks and even paper and pencils. Devices worth hundreds of dollars now often leave school buildings and go home with students.
“We need to protect those investments,” said Carl Colmark, finance director in Farmington schools, a district planning to put an Apple iPad tablet computer in the hands of every student by the end of the school year.
If the Finance Director for ISD192 is saying “we”, then “we” it should be, not “you”. While the cost savings are apparently great moving from textbooks which can last for up to a decade or more to an iPad which is outdated almost as soon as it is released to the public, it appears that school districts are looking to pass even more costs along to families who may not have wanted to make the jump into technology that is not only outdated but unlikely to be leveraged by the district effectively enough to offset the high cost. If the district wants to decide to put a $300 device in the hands of children who would lose their feet if they weren’t attached to their bodies, then they should be willing to put the additional $56/family into insurance for them.
Because the iPads are mandatory for students, parents MUST opt to pay the up to $56/year to make certain their children doesn’t break what amounts to a piece of glass. Knowing this and trying to fool taxpayers into believing their taxes weren’t impacted by that much, the district is nearly forcing families to pay even more per year in what should have been part of the levy. Cute. The district can claim this puts responsibility for the devices squarely with the kids and their parents, but to be perfectly honest, knowing what I was like in 4th grade through probably 9th grade and my penchant for losing things, I would not trust any kid with an iPad and certainly wouldn’t want the school forcing me to.
What do you think about this one? Do you think that iPads in schools are going to end up costing taxpayers a lot more in the long run due to faster replacement times than books, insurance, and outright replacement costs for damage? Should the school district have passed the insurance along as a part of the levy? Do you think the comment about putting more of the onus on the student and the family is a copout? Whatever you have to say about this one go ahead and comment on as I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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December 11th, 2012 at 8:23 am
There’s no way I’d let the kids bring them home at night (until they’re in high school. Maybe.). That’s crazy. If they have to have them, let the kids use them all day in school but I would not let them out the school’s front door.
December 11th, 2012 at 8:43 am
I guess I’d give the parents an option. They can either get the insurance or pay for the iPad if it breaks. If we ruined textbooks, we had to pay for them, so it should be the same thing with the iPad.
Off topic, sort of, but as I read this I kept thinking about the Mennonite (I think) kid who was in school with me K-12. He would have to leave the room if we watched videos or listened to music and wasn’t allowed to dance. If everything has moved to the iPad, how do religious minorities like that learn? Are there textbooks for everything on the iPad? Or maybe, because they weren’t totally Amish, the religion has changed to allow for iPad usage when it is educational?
December 11th, 2012 at 9:15 am
One of the reasons the iPads are there is because they are *supposed to* save potentially gobs of money on textbooks over the long run. Thus, anybody with basic middle-school budgeting chops could (and should) have easily budgeted in this pretty basic amount for what I’d consider to be a critical operating expense.
So, somebody at the district dropped the ball. Pretty stupid.
December 11th, 2012 at 9:42 am
Jason2, the flaw in your argument is that so much learning is now taking place outside of the traditional school day and traditional school setting.
Being in a school district that is trying to sort out this very issue, telling students to keep ipPads, netbooks, Chromebooks, or what ever device may be at school is contradictory.
That being stated, asking families to help insure the devices seems equally contradictory.
December 11th, 2012 at 9:48 am
The district is spending $3 million over 4 years to supply the iPads. Assuming the district had to pay $28 per student (this will be slightly inflated due to not every family having less than 3 kids) it would end up being $670,000 over four years for the insurance (they’re already paying $50,000 for those on free/reduced lunches).
December 11th, 2012 at 9:58 am
I can only assume that the school districts are going with iPads because of the availability of content. I wonder if any of the text book companies are creating content for the Kindle or Nook ecosystem? The costs of those are half of what a current or even previous generation iPad. I’d feel better about my kid being provided a $200 tablet, than a $400+ tablet.
Of course, by the time my kids are old enough to be in school, they will have moved on to something else. I hope that they work out the bugs by then.
December 11th, 2012 at 10:08 am
Nils, good point. The sort-of answer to your ponderance is that Apple did a pretty decent job of proactively courting the textbook publishers to create an ecosystem that works pretty well out of the gate.
http://www.apple.com/education/ipad/
Like you said, if this could happen on something that represented a lesser capital expense, all the better.
December 11th, 2012 at 10:35 am
What I look forward to is the news story about some crack-addled degenerate mugging a 6 year-old girl walking home from school in Farmington now that they know she’s carrying home an iPad.
I agree with Jason2. There is no reason why these need to be coming home. For what it’s worth, our kids are in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) schools where they are constantly using a variety of hardware, software, and media, including iPads as early as 1st grade. It’s simple for the school to tailor the workload such that they don’t need to have them at home in order to “learn outside of the traditional school day”.
I also don’t see a need for a 1:1 ratio of iPads to students. These can be shared resources used in a lab environment.
December 11th, 2012 at 10:41 am
The point of the iPads *IS* that they come home. We’re working towards the “inverted classroom” model, wherein kids watch lectures, etc. on their own at home and do what was historically the homework in class, where somebody is there to help them sort out what they learned.
December 11th, 2012 at 11:17 am
I can wrote more later, but I have at least two thoughts now:
(1). I would guess the district trying to have parents put some skin in the game as a means of encouraging student responsibility. There are a bunch of ways to do these programs and, properly led and organized, there is very little damage. One example is Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop who has a great iPad program. If you just toss kids iPads and cross-fingers for good luck, you’ll see much more damage. We don’t have a take-home program at my school, but we have 425 iPads out on kids desktops all day long and have had not one student iPad damaged.
(2). I wish schools wouldn’t lead with cost-savings as an argument for iPads. Maybe they will save money, maybe they won’t. The best argument for iPads is that you can significantly improve student learning. You won’t spend more $$ on textbooks, but you WANT to then spend some of that on apps so that the iPads are actually useful for more than browsing web.
December 11th, 2012 at 11:21 am
jorn, you did a much better job of explaining the reason for bringing devices home.
December 11th, 2012 at 11:39 am
Andyc, agreed. I think there should be some sort of rules about responsibility. And, as Carl Colmark was quoted in the original piece, parents can pay for the insurance or take the risk that they will pay replacement costs.
The troubling thing here (and I’ll go so far as to suggest this is one of the things Bill was hoping to point out by this post) is the “Oh, woops, we forgot this important and obvious part up front!” It feels, at least to me when I read the article, that the school district is coming around NOW with the whole insurance ask.
If that’s true, I think Mr. Colmark has some explaining to do.
December 11th, 2012 at 12:50 pm
Great thoughts jorn. I would probably enjoy (and learn from) a debate about comment #9 as I don’t strongly agree with that concept, but I’d rather just compliment you on some great input here. I do strongly agree with post #12 and the troubling aspect of the thought process.
December 11th, 2012 at 12:54 pm
We have an elementary aged student in the Farmington school district. Students are not allowed to bring the I-Pad home and for us this is a pattern that will continue for the foreseeable future.
Each day students are given time during the day to work on their assignments and she will need to continue this pattern in future years. We are already tempting fate by having her transporting a musical instrument back and forth but it our choice to have her join band and purchase an instrument.
We had no say in rental or insurance decisions for the I-Pads and we are unwilling to assume the responsibility that comes with removing it from the school.
December 11th, 2012 at 1:16 pm
MSPD: I’m intrigued by the inverted classroom idea, but I’m religious about very little in life. I should also clarify that it is entirely possible I gave ISD 192 far more credit than they deserve. ;)
December 11th, 2012 at 3:21 pm
We’re in 196, so I don’t know about 192.
December 11th, 2012 at 7:25 pm
Bill, I’m an avid reader of the blog, haven’t commented yet, but you’ve hit my hot button with this post. I was/am totally against the iPad initiative in the Farmington district. I agree with one of the other posts that the 1:1 ratio of iPad to student is completely unnecessary. Much of the same learning could be done on the iPads in a lab environment or by sharing a few classroom sets around a particular school. Farmington did this to put the district on the map; to try and attract more kids (read: more revenue) to the district. Now that they’ve spent $3M on iPads, somehow they’re suddenly projecting a $4-$6M budget shortfall over the next few years. Gee, how did the budget shortfall happen? It’s a shortfall caused by short-sightedness. The board heard less money on textbooks and jumped. I really don’t think the difference in cost is that significant, book publishers are huge companies and they will find a way to gouge buyers. Furthermore, our kids will probably suffer because teachers/administration will be purchasing cheaper books that have no proven results/research behind them. Some unknown author could be selling a similar textbook at 2/3rds the price of the well known one with wrong information. Next thing you know, our kids are learning that Columbus came over on the Titanic.
The board made yet another bad decision, not based on data or research, but on gut feel and, as an engineer, that drives me absolutely INSANE.
December 11th, 2012 at 11:01 pm
Wait, the students have to pay insurance, but then do not bring the I-pad home?
December 12th, 2012 at 10:27 am
Students do not have to pay insurance, nor do their parents. The article states that parents of students that take home ipads must either purchase insurance through this school program, or agree to pay for the devices if they are damaged. So if a student wants to take the ipad home, their parents will pay for the damage, one way or another.
One thought, I wonder how the insurance works? I know some insurance for devices is really really stupid. For example, for Dish Network you can enroll in insurance that covers your equipment should it fail. Monthly fee is $8 or something like that. But, the insurance is setup so that you can start the insurance one moment, and the next report a device that needs replacement. So you really don’t need to carry the insurance. you just pay $8 when the device breaks to get the insurance. Then cancel it once the part is replaced.
December 12th, 2012 at 10:45 am
Thanks to Mikeh for the reminder about how insurance fraud works.
December 12th, 2012 at 1:14 pm
I would like to add a few things to help clarify the iPads at Farmington. #1, we are not using cost reduction as a motive for the iPads. We are cutting expenses, like the annual $500k we spend making $22million paper copies, to pay for the iPads. #2, initiatives like the flipped classroom as explained above give our kids better access to working with teachers to learn and work problems, rather than relying on parents who often get to the point where they can no longer help their kids, or worse, who are never interested or able to help. The results are very promising where it has been done, including pilot programs in our district. # 3, our text books are $80 plus each and are outdated by the time they go to print. The iPad textbooks are updated continuously and cost less than $15 ea. they are far more engaging in the content they provide, and can help the students organize their notes for review when needed. This is another cost offset that will help pay for the iPad, while at the same time increasing student engagement. #4, Work books that we buy each year are limited by the paper they are printed on. With the iPad, we can increase the number of problems a student sees, or change the level as needed to fit the student’s individual progression. Which leads to the most important part. #5, the iPad gives us a tool to track each students progress and individualize their learning experience to give them the level of work or challenge that fits them. We are working to have each student reach their full potential by mastering skills for each level of learning, rather than pushing them to the next level before they are ready, ultimately alienating them and destoying their confidence, or holding back those who can go much faster. There has been a lot of thought put into this, planning by teachers and administrators, and lots of discussion with the public that have led us to the decision to go this route. I would be happy to discuss this in further detail, as I am sure our superintendent would as well. I can be contacted though the Farmington school district website. Brian Treakle, Farmington School Board
December 12th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
To Fehler, no, there is no insurance charge for those not bringing the iPad home. Only grades 4-12 will be able to bring them home, and they are in very tough, military spec (Griffin Survivor) cases.
December 12th, 2012 at 1:26 pm
It is sort of a shame that local school districts now need to be counterfeiting money in order to pay for things.
December 12th, 2012 at 3:42 pm
I’d promise each of these kids a Cray XK7 if I knew it would make them able to articulate a point better than Brian Treakle in post #21.
Can someone decode that gigantic, illegible mess of run-on sentences and grammatical offenses up there?