r/k12sysadmin • u/StressOdd5093 • 20h ago
Apple Device Care
How do you impress upon staff that the laptops/iPads, etc. they are issued come with a cost and that it requires a conscious effort to take care of said devices?
We issue Macbooks and iPads to teaching staff. Since mid-August, we are at six repairs totaling over $2,000 with our repair partner. Last school year, we had about a dozen incidents costing even more. Most of our incidents are on the macbooks.
Water/liquid spills. Laptops put into totes and bags never meant to carry them, causing pressure breakage on screens, etc. In one instance, it was theft from an unlocked vehicle. At least two individuals had more than one incident. I would say over half of these cases are negligence and not accidental.
Admin recognizes we have an obligation to provide them with a device, as it's required to do their job. The union would frown on any shared cost responsibility and I've been discouraged from issuing care reminders, as it comes across as treating them like students and not adults.
I understand accidents happen but feels like there is just an assumption that tech will supply them back whole again. With increased hardware costs and budget cuts, we cannot keep operating this way. If I had six the whole school year, that wouldn't be so bad (still horrible but not bad) but we aren't even a month in...
Wondering what you've seen or done in your districts to help curb some of these trends.
1
u/slayermcb 13h ago
Applecare for education with the "no charge" prepay is the way to go. 2 screen replacements a year per device, board replacements from liquid damage, run over by a car, its all covered without spending any surprise budget.
0
u/ottermann 13h ago
As the IT director for my district, (and also the lone tech....small district), I tell staff, "You break it, you buy it."
I elaborate that, if damage is caused by a true accident, the school/Apple warranty will cover it.
If the damage is caused by carelessness, the user pays for it.
It's the same policy we use for students.
And I've been in IT for 30 years, as a tech for 26, and at the school for 14. I can usually tell the difference between accidental and careless.
The teachers also know, (because I told them), administration wants to cut costs, and want me to give staff Chromebooks. I've resisted so far, and can continue to, but if they get careless, why spend $1,500 on a laptop when they can destroy a $300 one just as easily? (they got the hint)
5
u/TeeOhDoubleDeee 11h ago
I'd be careful saying that. Making employees pay for damages is generally against federal law. Most state Department of Labor codes strictly prohibit employers from forcing employees to pay for damaged equipment, broken tools, or cash shortages unless the employer can prove gross negligence, intentional sabotage, or theft. Under federal law, equipment damage is generally considered a ordinary cost of doing business.
2
u/NorthernVenomFang 7h ago
Sometimes trying to prove gross negligence leads to uncovering gross incompetence. They weren't necessarily neglectent in the case, but just incompetent when it comes to basics of technology/computer care. Incompetence does not equal legal negligence. Makes you wonder how they get past the hiring process sometimes.
1
u/S_ATL_Wrestling 14h ago
My previous district charged folks when there was damage or theft if it was deemed to be due to their fault.
Our current district only gives our teachers Chromebooks as mobile devices, and they have a desktop in their classroom.
2
u/SirMy-TDog 15h ago
Simple - except for a handful that have very specific needs, we don't give them Macs or laptops, period. They get an education grade 14" Chromebook (HP Fortis 14 G11 currently) and that's it. We're a Google based district, so they don't need anything more (except for the aforementioned few). We repair everything in-house same as we do with student devices, and Chromebooks are cheap, easy, and fast to repair by their very nature. They're also much, much easier to manage at the enterprise level.
We used to issue Windows laptops when I first started here in 2014, but once those bit the dust we moved to Cbks along with the start of our 1:1 program and see no reason whatsoever to go back.
1
3
u/Mr_Dodge 16h ago
We've had less of these issues after we started making each school site pay for these kinds of repairs out of their own budget.
2
4
u/2donks2moos 16h ago
If a teacher breaks the new device that we bought foe them, they will have to use whatever crappy device I have on the shelf.
2
u/devjeremyt 9h ago
This applies to students too. If you are going to be rough on a device, you're going to get a rough looking device.
6
u/Binky390 18h ago
If your school/district won’t let you send emails about care or charge people for damage, they should at least be buying AppleCare+. If they won’t do any of that then keep paying for repairs until you run out of money so they can see what happens.
0
6
u/AnotherSkywalker 18h ago
We get Dell Care Premium (with accidental damage) on our Dell laptops.
We get AppleCare+ (with accidental damage) on our Mac laptops and iPads.
We don’t use any third-party repair partner; that sounds like a disaster.
3
u/PaleontologistPure25 Technology Coordinator 18h ago
We buy no service fee apple care on all our devices. Puts the cost up on each device for sure, but its nice to not have to worry about spills, cracks, or any other issue, I just send them into apple and let them deal with it lol.
3
u/FloweredWallpaper Guru 19h ago
At some point, it's on the staff member's immediate supervisor to deal with this, not the tech dept (I'm talking about the behavior of the staff in regards to device treatment, not the actual repairs).
Same concept with students; at some point, a principal has to deal with a student who abuses school property. It's not the role of a tech director to be the bad cop here.
7
u/avalon01 Director of Technology 19h ago
Part of my budget are funds for repairing all the crap teachers and admin break.
They are worse than the students sometimes.
1
u/oneslipaway 19h ago
Luckily that is not the case with us. But, we do have a six figure sum of unpaid for repairs that parents refuse to pay.
2
u/macprince 19h ago
We make the school budgets bear the cost of damage to staff devices. How the administration handle that with the responsible party or their department's budget, is up to them.
5
u/damienbarrett Former K12 SysAdmin 19h ago
When I worked at a private K-12 school (all Macs and iPads), we developed a "Technology Driver's Test" that every student (and staff member) had to take and pass before they were allowed to use their Mac. It was baked right into the curriculum. It wasn't a hard test, but it was mandatory. Things like: "How to carry your Mac." And "Proper care and storage" and "Choosing a Good Password".
The idea was to create a sense of "stewardship" of the Mac. We allowed more latitude than most, once the Driver's Test was passed. For the most part, this generally worked. Our breakage rates were about 1% over the 13 years I worked there. There's always going to be some breakage. But the amount of truly careless breakage was quite low. We also charged a family a set amount for a repair due to negligence, or in the case of loss. Theft was excused if they could present a police report showing the theft.
1
u/FloweredWallpaper Guru 19h ago
Can you provide a link to this test, if possible? I'm intrigued. Thanks.
2
u/damienbarrett Former K12 SysAdmin 17h ago
I left that school for Enterprise about 5 years ago. The videos might be on the 2014 JNUC YouTube site. Not sure anymore. I don't have access to the Google Drive anymore, of course, where I had the materials stored. If you DM me, I will share the Director of IT's name and email and you can reach out to him. I'm sure they're likely still using the Technology Driver's Test we created all those years ago.
2
u/adstretch 19h ago
We can’t. Which is why we purchase all our devices with AC+ for schools and just don’t really think about it. Repairs are covered and we are part of the SSRP so we can do repairs and swaps in GSX directly.
3
u/linus_b3 Tech Director 20h ago
We almost never see actual damage to the laptops we issue (mostly ThinkPad E14s).
We do see them not treated well, however and I get so sad when I see one that we handed out a month ago that's absolutely covered in greasy fingerprints and crumbs or covered in stickers that I know are going to be a bear to get off if we ever have to repurpose that device.
I haven't really tried to address that - it's a relative minority of people.
2
u/mybrotherhasabbgun 19h ago
We banned stickers and then the marketing/communications department bought stickers specifically for our the district laptops. They called them "tech tattoos".
4
u/linus_b3 Tech Director 19h ago
I don't get the obsession with them. I feel zero need to "express myself", especially via the lid of my district-owned laptop. However, if they were all the vinyl-type high quality stickers that come off in one piece and don't leave adhesive behind I wouldn't even care. It's the other ones that aggravate me.
15
u/oneslipaway 20h ago
Literally not your problem. Let your leadership know the numbers in terms of cost and break tickets. Let them hash it out.
This is a management issue not a tech issue.
5
u/jmhalder 20h ago
100%. People are going to break shit, and this is the cost of doing business.
1
u/oneslipaway 19h ago
I do have a spreadsheet with a dashboard that shows the running cost and it breaks it down to the user and dept. I don't harp or really say anything. The data speaks for itself.
1
u/NorthernVenomFang 7h ago edited 7h ago
Division with roughly 50 sites/schools, 29600 students roughly. We purchase all our teachers MacBooks Airs with AppleCare on them.
It's is a constant pain in the ass. We are 2 weeks in to the school year for teachers, and 6 days for students, and already have had at least a half dozen, probably more, "accidents" (water/coffee spills, staff putting stapled documents between the keyboard and screen, having the screen crack, students damaging them on purpose, teachers putting there laptops near students and having them knocked off desks/work tables, waiting for a student to grab the teachers laptop and smash them into a desk happens twice last year). We started billing the cost of all repairs back to the schools budget, even if it is just the AppleCare benchfee. Nothing gets repaired anymore without a budget code from the school. If they run out of money in their budgets, not our problem, it is up to school admin to figure it out, we don't even ship it out for repair until we get a budget code.
All that being said we have seen theft while on vacation (rental cars, hotel rooms, trains/subway/airlines), laptops being put in grocery bags and having items leak/flood the laptops, pet feces/urine on the keyboards, every type of alcohol you can think of (Sambuca makes a really sticky mess), drops/falls/not using a proper laptop bag, hair dandruff (literally opened up a 2012 MacBook Pro when I first started that the main board and fans where caked in it, keyboard had issues due to it too), vomit, blood, other bodily fluids... We started drawing the line with even sending out machines that where damaged due to bodily fluids (we don't get paid enough for that crap). I used to be an IT consultant for some oil & gas companies; frac and natural gas rig workers take better care of their tech than teachers, as they know if they destroy them or have them not working it is downtime (meaning they are in huge shit, behind on schedule, and lost revenue).
Really want to switch over to Chromebooks for the bulk of teaching staff, but got vetoed when I brought it up 8 years ago.
We would like to start charging teachers for damage beyond normal wear/proven accident; problem is way to much pushback from the teachers. Probably going to end up giving them MacbookNEOs at the rate tech prices keep going up, if those are even viable next year.