Greenwood schools last in county to get Chromebooks

Greenwood schools will soon do away with most of its aging computers and switch to Chromebooks, making the district the last in the county to do so.

The Greenwood Community Schools Board of Education unanimously approved a lease of $350,500 for the corporation to purchase 1,550 Chromebooks.

The small district is the last of the six in the county to buy Chromebooks. Other schools have been using the devices for a few years, with Clark-Pleasant being the most recent to implement the technology in 2016. 

The Chromebooks will replace more than half of the district’s aging Windows laptops, said Todd Pritchett, assistant superintendent.

"This fits our most immediate needs," he said.

The Chromebooks will be shared across the district, with each school getting sets. The high school and middle school will primarily use classroom sets for English and math classes. The laptops that go to the elementary schools will be shared among classrooms, depending on teachers’ needs, Pritchett said.

This differs from other schools in the county, such as Clark-Pleasant and Center Grove, which have a one-to-one distribution of technology, giving students their own laptop or iPad to use in all classes and take home.

These newer Chromebooks are ideal because they will work faster than the classroom laptops students use now, said Kent DeKoninck, Greenwood schools superintendent. 

"The beauty of this is they’re much more (user) friendly, quicker to get logged into, easier to use," he said. "Students will not have to wait five minutes for a laptop to get through the login process."

The district hopes to get four to six years out of the Chromebooks before replacing them, Pritchett said. Overall technology fees will likely decrease for students because the Chromebooks are more cost-effective.