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Marble – Cherokee County Schools has tired of using Chromebooks and is switching to iPads in the coming three school years.
Chief Technology Officer Dane Rickett advised the school board to approve a lease agreement with Apple to supply iPads for students of Cherokee County Schools with a three-year rollout. The board approved the plan at its June 5 meeting.
Rickett said Chromebooks are inferior to iPads, but have met school district needs and were less expensive. But the price gap has closed, making iPads a better choice.
Chromebooks are simple laptops that run on Google’s Chrome operating system, essentially a web browser that runs a vast selection of Chrome and Android web apps available from the Play Store. They have limited capability without an internet connection, and the school versions have plastic cases.
Graduating seniors have the option to buy their devices, but rarely do.
“They’re never touched again once they leave here,” Rickett said.
iPads, on the other hand, are tablets with premium all-metal and glass exteriors, a large ecosystem of apps via Apple’s App Store, and are familiar to many, if not most, students thanks to widespread use of iPhones and personal iPads. Rickett said 92% of kindergartners in Cherokee County have experience with Apple IOS devices including iPads and iPhones.
During the rollout, grades 9-12 will get iPads in the 2025-26 school year starting this fall, then kindergarten, third and sixth grades until all students have iPads at the end of the three-year rollout.
Instead of using Google Docs (which also operates on iPads), the students will be using Microsoft and other products, Rickett said. The school district will be financing $727,147.36 over four years, with an annual payment of $181,786.84.
Under the contract, Apple will supply:
- 1,067 iPad Wi-Fi with 128 gigabytes of storage, with a unit price of $324 for those packaged in 10-packs and seven of the same iPads that come individually that are priced at $329.
- Eighty 11-inch iPad Air Wi-Fi with 128GB of storage, with a unit price of $539.
- One Apple TV 4K with Wi-Fi + Ethernet with 128GB of storage.
The contract also includes protective cases, AppleCare coverage for damage or loss, and Mosyle OneK12 subscriptions for 1,147 devices for $33,263.
Mosyle OneK12 is a platform that consolidates Apple device management, security and classroom management tools for K-12 schools into a single, unified solution. It simplifies IT management for schools using Apple devices by integrating features like MDM, content filtering, endpoint security, SSO, application management and classroom, according to industry reports.
Deployment and training for the rollout will cost an additional $34,270.52.