NK Schools Move Ahead with Chromebook Plan

The North Kingstown School Committee last week approved a lease agreement with South Easton, Mass.-based HUB Technical Services to equip the school district with 205 Chromebook computers and five portable technology carts — one for each elementary school — at a cost of $86,570.

The five-year lease plan is part of a technology revamp the School Committee approved earlier this year.

According to a school district report, funding for the Chromebook contract will come from the $400,000 technology fund balance the committee approved on Aug. 26. So far, about $22,000 of those reserved funds have been spent.

HUB Technical Services offered the lowest monthly lease cost out of the five bidders. Three bidders were disqualified from the bid due to a lack of provided information, Superintendent Phil Auger told the committee.

Auger described the carts as “rolling computer labs” that hold 30 Chromebooks, a projector and screen.

The first phase of the technology plan is to equip and train school principals and staff with the Chromebooks. Sixty-five of the Chromebooks will be given to staff while the remainder will be used with the rolling laptop carts.

The Chromebooks are manufactured by Hewlett Packard and feature 14 inch screens, 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage on an SSD drive. The machines run Chrome OS -- Google’s minimalist operating system that relies heavily on online cloud storage and the Google Docs suite of applications.