Alamance-Burlington school board members have signed off on a request to purchase Apple iPads for students at three elementary schools as a pilot intended “to look at what Apple equipment could do at the elementary level.”
The iPads will cost a total of $723,793, which will be funded by a portion of the county capital funding allocated to ABSS for the 2025-26 fiscal year and designated for technology needs, the school system’s chief technology officer Dennis Frye told school board members during their latest meeting.
Frye said that the iPads would be purchased – unlike the existing Chromebooks that ABSS leases and issues to students to use during the school day.
The school system will order 1,860 iPads at a cost of $325 each for students at Andrews, Eastlawn, and Elon Elementary schools, according to ABSS chief communications officer Emily-Lynn Adkins.
There was no discussion during the school board’s December 1 meeting about why those three elementary schools had been chosen for what Frye described as a pilot project.
“The selected schools represent a good demographic and socioeconomic mix as well as Title I [schools that receive supplementary funding for at-risk students versus non-Title I schools] and [offer foreign] language immersion [versus] non language immersion,” Adkins explained this week in an email to The Alamance News. “They are also fairly close in proximity and easy to service in case support is needed throughout the pilot,” she said.
“The goal is to learn from this,” the chief technology officer told the board. “We want to do this right. We don’t want to just give out a different device and think that something will change….With the iPad environment [students will have access to apps] and be able to support some of these creative problem-solving skills that we know students need.”
“We will back in January to request a second lease for some middle school Chromebooks,” Frye, the chief technology officer, told school board members during their latest meeting. “As part of a refresh for next year, hopefully [we] can phase in three additional schools as well.”
“I think Alamance County [needs to catch up] to what everybody else is doing,” school board member Avery Wagoner said. “I support this 100 percent.”
School board members subsequently voted 7-0 to approve using $723,973 in county capital funding to purchase the iPads for the three elementary schools.
Superintendent Dr. Aaron Fleming told the board last Monday night that, while Chromebooks are a “good budget option,” they’re not the same caliber of computers that students will use once they enter the workforce.
“I think what you saw from [two presentations earlier that evening], things are going pretty good in ABSS,” Fleming said. “When students enter the work force, they will not be using Chromebooks – they will be using the device that costs money.”
The latest annual report on statewide trends in student digital learning access in K-12 education, which the State Board of Education forwarded to the General Assembly earlier this year, showed that all 115 N.C. public school systems had issued a Chromebook or laptop to every student as of June 2023, the latest period for which the data is available.
Of the 115 N.C. public school systems, 90.37 percent (104 school systems) reported using Chromebooks; 8.56 percent (10 school systems) reported using Windows-based devices; and 1.07 percent (one school system) reported issuing Apple devices to students, the report states. The majority of N.C. public school systems reported using Chromebooks rather than the two most expensive options – laptops and Apple products – the report to the General Assembly states.
Lenoir County public school system began a digital learning initiative called Learning Creates Personal Success in 2014 that uses iPads, MacBooks, and other Apple devices; now, more than 8,300 students are assigned iPads and other Apple devices to use as their “primary tool in a blended learning environment,” according to Lenoir County school officials.
Adkins, however, indicated that several other N.C. public school systems have also started issuing Apple devices to their students since the data was compiled in June 2023 and included in the report to the General Assembly.
