Upgraded Staff Laptops on the Way

Part of sustaining our district’s One to World initiative includes regular updates to staff devices. Currently, our teacher laptops are all the same model, a MacBook Air 13-inch laptop, but the specific specifications vary depending upon the year they were purchased.

An opportunity recently arose that will allow our district to update all our MacBook Air teacher laptops, synchronize future teacher device acquisitions to a single cycle, and greatly offset the cost of a new purchase by selling our current teacher laptops to an asset company for a significant revenue.

Newly purchased MacBook Air laptops for teachers will again be the same model as our current laptops, MacBook Air 13-inch. However, the specifications of new laptops for teachers will include double the RAM (8GB) and new batteries that will allow longer use (5–7 hours on a full charge). Depending on the model you are using currently, other specifications will either remain the same or increase (new model specification: 13-inch, 1.6GHz i5, 8GB, 128GB flash storage, Intel HD Graphics 6000.)

The Barrington 220 technology support team is currently designing a process to migrate data from current teacher laptops to new laptops in the most efficient manner possible. We will contact each building with a process, timeline, and schedule to make the change. Our plan will allow us to complete the transition to a new device before teachers leave for Summer 2017.

For this upgrade cycle, the district plan is to work with an asset company and sell our used laptops. We do not plan to offer used teacher laptops for sale back to staff members. In the future, this practice may be more feasible when all laptops are identical and on the same acquisition cycle.