SPOKANE, Wash. – For Spokane Public Schools’ (SPS) 2024-2025 school year, there will be changes to the District’s laptop policy, and it will mostly impact middle school students.
High school students will be allowed to check out laptops for use at home.
SPS elementary and middle schools will decide when laptops should be checked out.
This does not change anything for elementary or high school students, but it means that middle school students will no longer be provided assigned laptops for the year.
SPS told NonStop Local this afternoon that this policy was adjusted this year for budgetary reasons. Many laptops provided to students in the past came back with damage. So, to cut back on repair costs, SPS is moving to this system.
“[My child’s] teacher mentioned that they were not going to be assigning individual laptops for students anymore… Students [can] access laptops at school, but they [stay] in school. They don’t go home with them. My biggest issue is that no parents were told about this prior to about four days out to the start of school,” Rachel Román, a mother of an SPS middle schooler, said.
Román told NonStop Local she contacted other parents of SPS students to see if they had heard about the change. None of the parents she spoke with were aware about the plans. Like Román, they were concerned with, what they describe as, a lack of transparency from the District about their plans.
The 2024-2025 school year begins Tuesday.
