Across the country, millions of students have been learning remotely since March 2020. According to the US Census, nearly 93 percent of people in households reported their children engaged in some form of distance learning this year. With that in mind, as another school year ends, device reclamation is more distributed than ever.
For school IT teams, this means a chaotic time when the district’s computers–especially those the students use for learning–must be accounted for and inspected for usability ahead of the next school year. Device collection is always challenging, but never more so than this past year that saw education institutions rapidly scaling 1:1 programs to enable remote learning.
Whether you’re approaching the device reclamation period or are looking for ways to improve it next year, there are a variety of decisions and steps that IT teams can take to ensure that end-of-year device reclamation is as painless as possible.
1. Decide which devices have to be returned
As a first step, determine whether devices need to be returned, and if so, how many will be part of this transition. Some schools may choose to provide students with opportunities to ‘catch up’ on learning gaps created during COVID-driven remote learning with summer school programs that require in-home devices. Others want to finally complete a thorough device inventory since they purchased thousands of new devices to support remote learning and haven’t yet had a chance to complete a real-time inventory.
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