Alamance County’s commissioners have agreed to lift the regulatory firewalls to let the Alamance-Burlington school system enter into a five-year lease-to-own agreement to acquire 6,000 laptops for its students.
This deal, which received a unanimous nod from the commissioners last week, will provide new Hewlitt-Packard Chromebooks to just over a quarter of its 22,500 students to replace older devices that have purportedly reached the end of their useful lives. The school system, in turn, will be obligated to pay $328,999 a year, or a grand total of $1,664,995, to lease the computers, which ultimately belong to the schools at the end of the contract’s five-year term.
Dennis Frye, the technology director for ABSS, told the commissioners that, over the long-term, the school system hopes to implement a series of such deals so that, each year, it can acquire new computers for a specified portion of its students. He added that this sort of arrangement is the best way for the schools to acquire the latest technology at a reasonable price – which, in this case, he said, works out to $277.50 for each student laptop.
“In comparison to other districts,” he said during a regularly-scheduled meeting last Monday, “we are probably at one of the lowest prices per student machine.”
The commissioners went on to approve this agreement after peppering Frye with various questions about the mechanics of this arrangement as well as the computers themselves.
Commissioner Ed Priola was especially concerned that the schools aren’t getting stuck with antiquated technology that they can’t replace until the contract runs out. Frye insisted that, by having a rotation of these lease-to-own deals, the school system will avoid this predicament.
“Every year, we evaluate new technology, and we take advantage of it,” he explained. “We won’t be buying this same device in subsequent years. It will be an improved device.”
Meanwhile, commissioner Kelly Allen wanted to make sure that help with the computers would be available to students, particularly those from non-English speaking households.
There are several groups in the community who know that as well,” the school system’s technology director responded, “and they are actively looking for us to do some education and collaborate with them.”
The commissioners voted 5-to-0 to approve the proposed contract.
