Roseville school board OKs purchase of new computers

ROSEVILLE — Roseville Community Schools staff members, along with students in grades three to 12, will start the 2024-2025 school year with brand-new computers.

At the district’s Feb. 26 Board of Education meeting, the school board voted 5-0 to purchase more than 4,000 new Dell computers. Board members Matthew McCartney and Kevin Switanowski were absent. The district’s technology director, Mike Antoine, and Paul Twigg, senior designer with Barton Malow, requested the purchase.

The new computers will be funded through the district’s $58.9 million bond issue that passed in 2018. About 544 teacher computers and approximately 3,800 student computers will be ordered through People Driven Technologies, based in Byron Center, Michigan. The total cost for the purchase, including a five-year warranty with additional accidental damage coverage, is $2,746,314.80.

Barton Malow, based in Southfield, is the construction manager of the bond projects. Partners in Architecture, in Mount Clemens, is the architectural firm.

“These staff laptops and these student laptops are for our refresh of laptops we purchased almost five years ago,” Antoine said. “As part of our bond issue, we are going to refresh these three times, the initial purchase, this purchase and one more five or six years down the road.”

Before bringing the request to the school board for approval, district officials conducted surveys with the teachers to see what their needs were. Staff tried out the computers and provided feedback to school officials.

“Teachers were given the opportunity to look, view, touch the computers and try them,” Twigg said. “Based on pricing, based on that teacher feedback, the Technology Department and district administration decided to go with Dell laptops as the standard for the next round of purchases.”

School officials worked with Barton Malow, which put together a bid specification. The district’s educators will receive laptops with a 14-inch monitor touch screen, backlit keyboard, Intel processor, more internal memory and longer battery life. The students’ computers can be used as either a laptop or a tablet.  They will come with an 11.6-inch touch screen, Intel processor, more internal memory, world facing camera and longer battery life.

The staff computers will be ordered by mid-March so employees can have them by early May. According to Antoine, this will give them time before the end of the school year to transition to the new laptops and return their old computers to the district before summer break.

The student computers will be ordered around the same time as the staff computers and will be distributed in the early fall. Students will be able to take the computers home with them every day after school. The student computers will come with protective cases.

Before the end of the school year, the Technology Department will help the teachers as they transition from the old computers to the new computers. If there is a need for a form of training such as group, written instructions, or short video clips the department will provide the support.