Saline Area Schools Purchases New Technology

Saline Area Schools is devoting just over $300,000 toward new technology purchases as it looks to replace and update some Chromebooks at the elementary level as well as computers inside the labs.

The Saline Board of Education, by unanimous votes, approved two sets of purchases at its May 13 meeting.

Jay Grossman, Saline Area Schools’ Director of Technology, submitted two recommendations to make technology purchases to the superintendent and school board.

Grossman said the chromebooks provided for third grade have reached their age of replacement. He requested approval for the purchase of 500 devices through Trafera, who are an approved vendor on the REMC consortium bidding contract.

These devices will cost $164,500.

“This will replace all of the third grade Chromebooks as well as replenish our devices for loaner Chromebooks to provide to families who have a broken device or a financial need and cannot afford to purchase a device,” Grossman said. “This will help ensure all students have a device to access our digital curriculum.”

With the computers, Grossman asked the school board to approve to purchase 150 Mac Mini computers along with wired keyboards and monitors to replace the current devices used in the student iMac labs at Saline High School, Middle School, and Liberty.

“The current devices are approaching six years old and will no longer receive software and security patches,” according to Grossman. “The new computers will be supported for the next five years while the monitors and keyboards will last up to 10 years.”

Grossman said they are changing the model of their current labs from the all-in-one iMac to the Mac Mini with keyboard and monitor as the processing power of the Mac Mini is higher while the cost has reduced.

The school district will pay $140,092 for these new set of computers.

Photo by Louise Viallesoubranne on Unsplash.