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Education Hardware

40,000 Chromebooks and 9,600 iPads Went Missing At Chicago Public Schools During COVID (suntimes.com) 90

Posted by BeauHD from the tech-assets dept.
theodp shares a report from Chicago Sun-Times, written by Frank Main: When the school system [Chicago Public Schools] shifted to having students learn remotely in the spring of 2020 near the beginning of the pandemic, it lent students iPads, MacBooks and Windows computer devices so they could do school work and attend virtual classes from home. CPS then spent about $165 million to buy Chromebook desktop computers so that every student from kindergarten through senior year in high school who needed a computer could have one. Students borrowed 161,100 Chromebooks in September 2020. By June 2021, more than 210,000 of those devices had been given out. Of them, nearly 40,000 Chromebooks have been reported lost -- nearly a fifth of those that were lent.

"Schools have made repeated efforts to recover the lost devices from families without success," according to a written statement from CPS officials in response to questions about the missing school property. Also missing are more than 9,600 iPads, 114 televisions, 1,680 printers and 1,127 audiovisual projectors, among many other items. Officials say CPS has bought new computer devices to replace the missing ones. Longtime Slashdot reader theodp notes that "there were 340,658 students enrolled in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at the start of the 2020-2021 school year."
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40,000 Chromebooks and 9,600 iPads Went Missing At Chicago Public Schools During COVID More

40,000 Chromebooks and 9,600 iPads Went Missing At Chicago Public Schools During COVID

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  • Welcome to Chicago.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Democrat cities.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        redundant. there are no republican cities. that's why republicans oppose education.

        • There are plenty of cities and states controlled by Republicans. And their schools are just as bad, if not worse.
          • You have no idea how bad things are in Chicongo. Me and my wife Sanja Pantic had to move cities because of the joggers stealing bikes and ipads. My windows were smashed in multiple times. They got my wife's laptop and planted Freenet and child porn on it to get me in trouble.
            • Yeah, you've got bigger issues if someone goes to the length of planting childporn on your stolen computer. Either your stolen computer had childporn and the thieves got disturbed, cold feet or disgusted with you or it's someone that really hates your guts and does everything they can to hurt you.
            • Finding this link (https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=2567414) kind of gives me a little relief knowing that you might not be a pedophile. Your horrible experience probably is because of your wife's social, teaching and language inabilities while trying to teach students math.

              • Did the GP post his wife's real name? Doubtful. Lucky you were there to complete the other half of the troll.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

            So what you're saying is that it's Americans that are awful?

            Sorry, couldn't resist :D.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )
        More than likely, it's the students that account for the vast majority of the missing items.

    • The summary is poorly written and garbled, but CPS apparently paid $165M for 210,000 Chromebooks.

      That is $785 each. Walmart sells nice Chromebooks, at full retail, for $149.

      Why do Chicago voters put up with this level of corruption and incompetence?

      In the last 50 years, four Illinois governors have gone to prison. So it isn't just Chicago. But still, one horror story after another comes from that city.

      • Same reason they elected this guy governor [chicagotribune.com], I guess.

        • In Illinois, it's not political parties that matter. It's corrupt / not corrupt. And very few non-corrupt people get elected to the higher offices. Interestingly, this democratic governor gets his sentence commuted by Donald Trump. They're on the same team, regardless of party.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbengt ( 874751 )

            In Illinois, it's not political parties that matter. It's corrupt / not corrupt. And very few non-corrupt people get elected to the higher offices.

            I've always said, half-jokingly, that the Illinois state office building in Chicago is called the Thompson Center because we're so proud of a governor that managed to never get indicted.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hazem ( 472289 )

        The summary is poorly written and garbled, but CPS apparently paid $165M for 210,000 Chromebooks.

        That is $785 each. Walmart sells nice Chromebooks, at full retail, for $149.

        It would be interesting to see the budget for that broken out. I wonder if that includes service contracts, improving wireless networks in schools, personnel and equipment to administer them, training for teachers, licenses for education software, etc. Google charges an additional $50/chromebook per year to handle enterprise enrollment.

        Plus if they were buying them as the pandemic took off, they were likely forced to pay much higher prices or extra fees to get them shipped on time. I tried to get a decen

      • They also omitted to mention that they handed out 80,000 Windows 10 laptops and got 92,000 back.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        The summary is poorly written and garbled, but CPS apparently paid $165M for 210,000 Chromebooks.
        That is $785 each. Walmart sells nice Chromebooks, at full retail, for $149.

        Well, TFA also calls the "Chromebook desktop computers".
        So I'm guessing the $165 million includes all the Chromebooks, tablets, desktops, servers, infrastructure, software, programming, setup, etc., and not just the price you'd pay for a barely usable Chromebook at Walmart.

    • Indeed. This kind of thing is very normal for Chicago. CPS exists primarily to serve as a money funnel from the taxpayers to connected contractors and unionized employees. Education takes a backseat to this.

      • And yet we can say such black and white truths as plainly as ordering a cup of coffee, but can't seem to do a fucking thing about it except publish stories.

        Shame we went after Capone like that. He was on his way to earning a Pulitzer.

        Oscar? No, they have more of an open-hand policy towards awarding violence.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        CPS exists primarily to serve as a money funnel from the taxpayers to connected contractors and unionized employees.

        As a person who works for a company that regularly does business with CPS (indirectly, mainly through architects), I know that is not true. It is true that they can be wasteful, and corruption is far from unimaginable, but your cynicism is way off base and unhelpful.

    • An entirely predictable outcome.

    • This was obvious result anywhere on this planet. So stupid. . .

    • You laugh? Years ago, IBM told me that my employee personnel data had been compromised. Their explanation for how it happened: the archive tape containing the data fell off a truck on the way to the storage facility.

  • Students borrowed 161,100 Chromebooks in September 2020. By June 2021, more than 210,000 of those devices had been given out.

    • Just reading comprehension. The first count is as of an earlier date. The second count is a later date. Imagine if more devices are distributed over time.

    • Let's see they started by loaning 161,000 devices, and nearly a year later, a total of 210,000 devices were loaned (given) out. So an extra
      Hm. That's an extra 1,300 devices per week. The arithmetic seems ok to me.

      I becoming even more concerned about American schooling.

  • Covid wasn't so much a pandemic as the best opportunity for graft in the history of mankind, and Chicago is the king of graft.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Trump is the king of graft, your hero. Also, Chicago is the victim in this case, some "king of graft".

      And, sure, COVID "wasn't so much a pandemic", if was fake news are your boy Trump told us. After all we had natural immunity to it from the beginning. You told us this yourself.

      One would think you'd get better at this BS, SuperKendall, but you never do.

    • It's hardly that. I can't insure devices used by kids for a very specific reason, they simply can't be held liable. They forget, they put their expensive shit everywhere where not appropriate, they want to avoid homework and they fucking loose their "books", in this case a Chromebook. It's kids. Probably a lot of these Chromebooks been lost due to accidents, and then reported stolen due to insurance companies being a fucking mess and misunderstanding by patents thinking they'll be liable for repairs and n

    • Nothing compared to what the Westminster[England/UK] government wasted.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Covid wasn't so much a pandemic as the best opportunity for graft in the history of mankind, and Chicago is the king of graft.

      Really, it is highly unlikely that are large part of these numbers are from graft of politicians or CPS employees. They gave these out to students to use at home. Are you really surprised that students "lost" a bunch of them?

  • Will be higher this year, just a hunch.

  • The 1% pocketed about a trillion dollars (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @09:10PM (#62401217)
    In covid relief funds and did nothing with them. My personal favorite example was the airlines took a huge amount of money with the promise of not laying anyone off and then used contractor tricks and shenanigans so that they could fire people without technically firing any of "their" employees.

    In addition to that trillion dollars that we just handed to the top 1%, they price gouged us on food and rent and took advantage of the declining economy to buy up single-family homes so that millennials and zoomers and gen xers who couldn't buy houses yet have been completely priced out of the market of anywhere except places without jobs.

    All told the top 1% pocketed around 4 trillion dollars as a direct result of the pandemic.

    But sure, let's all worry about a bunch of dirt poor kids making off with the 100 million dollars in computer hardware. That's the number one concern. If a poor person steals a nickel we will spare no expense throwing that person into slammer for life. When a rich person steals trillions we shrug it off as just the way things are.

    I'm just going to say it. You all are a bunch of Simps for the 1%. Everybody seems to think they belong to the aristocracy and they're just laughing at you behind your backs. I wish we as a country would get tired of being made fools of.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ormy ( 1430821 )
      100% this. Wish I had modpoints.
    • Spot on, this is spot on.
    • I read once that the in the USA “the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

      • That's not wrong. The upper 1% (or maybe less at this point) sell "The American Dream." This concept is shoved down our throats day-in and day-out when we're young. The idea that anybody can "make it." Anybody can become one of the 1% or less, if you just buckle down and work hard enough.

        It's a lie. There's a reason they're referred to as the 1%. And the whole "if you work hard enough" is just an excuse to keep the treading masses treading for the 1% and building more wealth for the 1% while most of us won'

        • Well tovarish if the capitalist pigs offend you so, feel free to relocate to one of the many successful proletariat paradises and live your best life there. Oh wait, there aren't any b/c they don't exist. But feel free to rage against the machine, man.

          • Right, asking for the 1% to start paying taxes again is EXACTLY the same thing as decrying capitalism altogether. Way to strawman it up, brother.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      You seem really hung up on this idea that we should forgive everyone for scamming or stealing funds except for those "wealthy 1%ers".

      Yeah, no.... Wrong is wrong, and it's not exactly surprising that the amount people rip off is relative to their total worth. The poor kid in Chicago city is going to think he/she hit a gold-mine reselling a stolen school laptop, because it might equate to half of their total earnings or wealth. The business guy who runs a trillion dollar company is only going to think the

  • I am suprised they expected to get any back (Score:3)

    by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @09:16PM (#62401221) Homepage

    I'll bet they paid more for accounting and tracking these devices than they are actually worth. I really don't understand why they did not just assume they are given to the students to keep, it would be easier and cheaper.

    • That was likely the real issue here... the units were essentially gifted to students at what I would consider a reasonable rate for a district like Chicago. They were also damaged at a rate slightly higher than corporate America, so the "gifts" are likely only half of what I would still consider reasonable and a successful program.

      A metric shit-ton of money was wasted in the Pandemic, some with good intents and some by opportunists. Without further information I will be an optimist and go with the former.

    • I really don't understand why they did not just assume they are given to the students to keep, it would be easier and cheaper.

      This was the (clarifying) statement provided one sentence into TFA:

      "The police suspect that much of the property CPS has listed as missing actually was stolen by people with access to school buildings during the pandemic."

      This appears to actually be a story about grand theft, not irresponsible students. In other words, this is clickbait bullshit. Buy better locks for schools and install actual surveillance. This was likely an avoidable crime, and I'm not sure why we're even believing a claim of "lost" property.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbengt ( 874751 )

        actually was stolen by people with access to school buildings

        Buy better locks for schools and install actual surveillance.

        People with access to school building already have keys to the locks, and some of them have access to the surveillance.

        • As I said, buy better locks. That would include the locks to the surveillance room.

          If the police are pointing their fingers internally, then it's probably a wise place to start improving security.

          And "some of them" implies a limited amount of people that should have been questioned.

    • It's an alienation of public property so maybe they would need the State legislature to pass a bill (But I'm talking from EU, maybe that would be different in US.) Then there would be the cost of having public officials drafting this new program, determining criteria for the donations and then implementing a tracking system to know which property has been formally donated. An easier system is a refund of up to X to buy yourself your necessary gear (which I've this implemented with public money), but this o

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • How many students went missing during the same time? 2020 was a hard year and a lot of students just dropped of the face of the earth.

  • They got legs!

  • Your tax dollars at work, lol! And on top of this Chicago has some of the worst schools in the country. But also I love how liberal politicians (the only kind in Chicago) try to spin this kind of thing (why are kids getting free laptops and tablets, but not free books?) as necessary to achieve "equity".

    • The biggest problem is not that the schools are bad, but that the students are stupid.

      In the 1970s, when the dangers of lead poisoning and lead's effect on IQ and anti-social behavior became apparent, most cities banned the use of lead pipes in new construction.

      Under pressure from the unions, Chicago did the exact opposite, and mandated the use of lead pipes. So today, Chicago has the highest levels of lead in drinking water in any major city. Chicago children have twice the blood lead levels of the natio

      • I don't understand why Chicago isn't pursuing pipe lining as a solution. The pipes are accessed at two locations, the pipe is then cleaned and lined with a pull-in-place lining coated with two-part epoxy, and left to harden overnight. The new epoxy lining is good for 35-50 years. This would alleviate the need to dig up every foot of the service line.

        https://www.nuflowmidwest.com/... [nuflowmidwest.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "Your tax dollars at work, lol!"

      No, local tax dollars at work, and hysterical!

      "And on top of this Chicago has some of the worst schools in the country. "

      Citation needed, and you're an asshole.

      "But also I love how liberal politicians..."

      What a surprise!

  • that if they had passed out hardcover books to the kids, a lot fewer would have "gone missing". Books can't be used to play games or browse the web, and they have little re-sale value.

    Why is it that certain people absolutely refuse to learn any of life's most basic lessons, no matter how many times reality smacks 'em up aside the head? This is just another version of "the tragedy of the commons", which is part of why Marxism always fails - when something is bought with other peoples' money, and supposedly o

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hazem ( 472289 )

      Books can't be used to play games or browse the web, and they have little re-sale value.

      Neither do enterprise-enrolled Chromebooks; you can't use these unless you use the enterprise login. Sure, you can find them pretty cheap on eBay and such, but it's non-trivial to get them un-enrolled without approval from the enterprise they're enrolled to.

      I thought I had accidentally gotten one of these and found out it would take opening it up and using an eeprom programmer to flash a new firmware on it. Luckily, when I tried to find out what enterprise it had been enrolled to (so I could report/return

    • My kids school just tells parents to buy their kid a chromebook. It's just kind of an expected expense for grades 7+ at this point. There is funding availble for families that can't afford it. But the vast majority of families can afford it and do buy a chromebook for their kids. I'm sure that they take a lot better care of them knowing that they have to pay to replace it if it gets broken or lost. I guess that I'm just fortunate to live in a reasonably well to do area that a system like this can work.

  • Send the bill to the families and see how fast the devices are found.

    • So there's the problem... if they're anything like the chromebooks our district gave out, FMV would be about $10/ea. I had to fix both of them because they had screws rattling around inside shorting things out (how they didn't actually die permanently is beyond me).

      I haven't returned them, not because I don't want to (in fact, I want the damn things out of my house), but because they didn't actually make it easy to return them. They said "On this day, bring them to this place." If that day happened to be

  • This could be avoided (Score:3)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @06:06AM (#62402169)
    If they let students keep equipment through the whole of their schooling then keep it in the end, also when necessary hand them in for an upgrade this wouldn't happen. The additional cost would not be much either, if they didn't replace them for the last few years their value would have mostly depreciated.
  • After all, have you met children? They can't keep track of anything!

  • This has been happening at all the school districts around the country. Maybe not at those numbers per school district, but at pretty significant numbers and or percentages.I have first hand knowledge of this.

  • "Schools have made repeated efforts to recover the lost devices from families without success"

    Uh, wtf? You don't recover them. You charge a replacement fee or report it as a loss if the family is unable to pay back.

    Here in my city (purple city in a blue county/school district, in a red state), our schools lend us a laptop for every kid during the pandemic. We had to sign a contract, outlines rights and responsibilities and terms of use. Moreover, it laid out the cost of replacement in case a laptop was damaged, lost or stolen. Every laptop had a serial number tied both to a student id, a teacher i

  • Hmm, if they ordered and gave out over 210K of devices, and other school districts gave out thousands more also, could this be part of why we've had a chip shortage over the last couple of years? Sure, I know there have been other factors, but this really wouldn't have helped. I can remember how hard it was to get new computers at the beginning of the Covid days.
  • Go into Google admin for the chromebooks and disable them. Do the same in whatever MDM they use for iPads. That way at least you will get some of them back.
  • Losing 20% of their inventory every year is more-or-less comparable to textbooks. Textbooks get replaced every five to ten years, budget permitting. Kids are crap at taking care of stuff, whether that is clothes, books or computers. Stuff gets broken, lost, scribbled on, fed to the dog.

  • Do a search for "used chromebook buy", and you'll see where they all went. I should go check my local pawn shop: I can imagine how many are there.

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