East Brunswick Schools Weigh In On Laptop Costs, Insurance, Personal Devices

EAST BRUNSWICK, NJ — East Brunswick school officials pushed back on concerns about the cost of student devices, explaining why the district charges for device insurance and why students can't bring their own laptops, during the last Board of Education meeting.

Responding to questions submitted to board members, Superintendent Evelyn Mamman said the district's devices do not cost millions of dollars a year, as some residents have suggested.

The district is on a six-year rotation to replace student devices, Mamman said. For kindergarten through fourth grade, it buys about 450 Chromebooks a year to replace those that have aged out or are badly damaged. The price per Chromebook has risen from about $220 to about $330, bringing the annual cost to roughly $150,000.

"So it's not like every year I spend a million dollars," the superintendent said.

Even replacing every device at once at current prices would come to roughly $900,000, she estimated, adding that the district doesn't do that.

"We can't afford to do that. That's not how to do business," she said.

Students in seventh through 12th grade use laptops, which they keep from seventh grade until they graduate high school. Younger students use Chromebooks. Mamman said older students need laptops because their coursework, including career and technical education classes, requires more than a Chromebook can handle.

Filtering at school and at home

Mamman also addressed whether students can get around the district's firewalls. The district has added another firewall layer and uses Aristotle K12, a web filtering service that runs 24 hours a day on student devices, both at school and at home.

"I don't believe our kids are bad actors, so I'm going to say that it's not easy to get around our firewalls," she said. "If there's a kid that can go around that firewall, I want to hire them."

Asked whether the restrictions keep students from resources that could help them academically, Mamman pointed to YouTube, which is blocked by default.

"I can't protect kids and then open YouTube. It's just counterintuitive," she said.

Instead, teachers can request specific YouTube links, and the district will unblock them.

Device insurance

A board member asked why the district charges for device coverage when some neighboring districts don't.

"I wish I didn't have to charge for it," Mamman said, noting that some nearby districts have more money and receive more state aid.

She stressed that the coverage is optional.

"If you don't want to take it, don't take it. If anything breaks, you pay for it," she said. "It's just that simple."

"I cannot really compare East Brunswick to anybody else," she added.

No personal devices

The Superintendent said district policy prohibits students from using personal devices in place of district-issued ones. She said the policy keeps the district in compliance with state law, which requires student devices to be properly filtered, secured and managed, and noted that some neighboring districts' bring-your-own-device policies are no longer allowed.

Equity is also a factor, since not every family can afford a device, she said.

The discussion came as the district also shifts toward more handwriting and less screen time in classrooms.

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