On behalf of all students and staff of Pennridge High School, we the Pennridge Change committee, are requesting that students be allowed to bring their own laptops to use in the 21st century classroom. Pennridge is missing out on a huge opportunity. The laptops that have been given to each Pennridge student in the school through the 1:1 initiative, quite frankly, aren't worth the money. Estimating that each laptop costs $450, if even that, multiplied by roughly 520 students, equals $234,000. That's a ton of money...especially for laptops that have many issues at the worst times.

Many Students Have Their Own Laptops

We're unsure if the Pennridge administration knows about this, but there are actually a lot more people out there with their own laptops, that are 1,000% better than the school provided laptops. The reason we say Pennridge is missing out on the opportunity is because this money being wasted on each student who already owns a nice laptop could be put to better use.

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Current Pennridge-Provided Laptops Have MANY Issues

Since a low amount of money is spent on each laptop given to students, the laptops in result are low quality. The biggest issue that not one freshman has yet to complain about is the dreaded blue screen. Pennridge thinks these laptops are great; they can be a tablet to with the flip of a keyboard. They said this to students, the students flipped their laptops, and they crash with the blue screen. Sometimes the blue screen appears randomly and it is thought to be the fact that switching routers is too much for the computers to handle, so in result...they crash.

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All That's Needed is Internet Access; No Extra Software

Because everything we do on our school laptops is over the internet (Canvas, Google Docs, Google Slides, watching videos, etc), there is no need to download any extra software other than the Microsoft Office applications; which may we remind you, Pennridge is allowed to have every student download these programs on 5 devices whether they are Pennridge-supplied or not.

"Opening the Internet Would Cause a Problem", Nope...

As the Pennridge Board you may be thinking that this would be impossible since you can't have students' own laptops messing with the district networks. A new network could be created dedicated to providing internet access. But it is clear that this infrastructure is already in place as a Public Wi-Fi network sometimes is turned on, and is always on in the office. As it is understood, the Pennridge IT Department just needs to flip a switch since the website blocking service provided by iBoss carries throughout the network.

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If you are a student, in the comments field, tell us all about how much you hate your laptop, and give us another good reason to allow you to bring your own laptop. The more evidence we have, the harder we can slam the School Board.