The laptop shortage at one of SC’s largest school districts is absurd | Opinion
Pop quiz: What’s the single most important thing to help students learn in school today?
Answer: A laptop, especially for kids without one at home. Laptops help students not only do work but also learn on their own.
Yet the Richland 1 School District, where classes began Aug. 11, has a significant middle and high school student laptop shortage that won’t even be addressed with new computers until the end of September — and a laptop inventory so woeful some schools couldn’t meet an Aug. 27 deadline to produce theirs.
Worse, district officials who briefly discussed the shortage at an Aug. 19 school board meeting, are patting themselves on the back for being transparent about all this while being the opposite.
At that meeting and in an email to parents the next day, superintendent Todd Walker directly acknowledged the district’s failures but omitted several details the public has a right to know.
“We fully understand the importance of laptops in supporting student learning, and we recognize the impact this shortage has on our students’ academics,” he emailed parents of middle and high schoolers in one of South Carolina’s largest districts. “This is not acceptable. We know that students need laptops every year at the beginning of the year. We can do better and we will do better.”
He told parents the district was undertaking a “comprehensive inventory of surplus student laptops” by Wednesday, Aug. 27 (a deadline that was later extended until Friday, Aug. 29.) He said any extra laptops would be sent to schools “with the most significant shortages” and that 4,000-plus newly ordered laptops should arrive by the end of September. “In the interim,” he wrote, “please rest assured that no student will be penalized for not having a laptop to complete assignments.”
Won’t be penalized? That should go without saying. That he had to say it underscores the essential nature of computers and the extent of the district’s disgraceful problem.
Walker’s first test
Walker’s first day on the job was July 1, so he deserves some credit for making this fiasco public at last month’s board meeting. But his pledge to be transparent about it already seems hollow.
Walker’s email to parents omitted some key details. Those 4,000 laptops? The board approved $4.4 million for that purchase back in May and one board member — Ericka Hursey — even made a point of signaling just how important the technology was to the district’s 21,500 or so students.
That day, according to a WLTX News 19 story, Hursey suggested that instead of approving a broader $17 million capital projects plan that included the money for laptops, the board should just approve the laptop purchase until the district provided more information about the other costs.
It was a clear sign that the board wanted the computer purchase to proceed expeditiously.
In addition, the capital projects list the district showed the board that day noted $2 million of the purchase would replace laptops for teachers and students in kindergarten and first and second grade and $2.4 million would replace laptops for students in grades three through 12. That means much of that order wasn’t meant for middle and high school students with the shortages.
I asked the district, “Of the 4,000 new computers expected at the end of September, how many are for students and how many are for teachers, and how will the district distribute them?”
The reply came back, “All of those laptops are for students,” without more specificity than that.
So much for that transparency pledge.
Walker did not grant interview requests Friday or Tuesday, and the district declined to share the laptop inventory with me Tuesday. That’s a basic document every district should be able to distribute the day of a request. So when will that public inventory be released? It’s unclear. Is the problem broken laptops? Students not returning them? The district ordering too few? Unclear.
A district spokeswoman told me part of the laptop order was placed in May and part had to wait until July when Dell had completed a new contract with its repair vendor. Would anyone be held accountable? The district didn’t answer my question.
Walker’s email to parents described the issue and its origins like so: “Due to multiple reasons — including inventory control and loss prevention issues; capital budget reductions; disruption of the laptop replacement cycle; vendor delays; and ESSER [Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund] funding limitations — many of our schools are experiencing challenges in ensuring that every student has access to a laptop at the beginning of the school year.”
That’s insufficient. The public — parents and taxpayers alike — need to be told who was at fault for this ordering delay, how it was allowed to happen and what will change to prevent anything like this in the future.
It’s also not enough to blame this on the last superintendent though he bears some responsibility. Superintendents surround themselves with administrative teams so purchases like this aren’t overlooked and so students have what they can’t do without.
The previous superintendent, Craig Witherspoon, resigned after the 2024 school board elections when his performance and the district’s extensive fiscal mismanagement became such big issues that multiple candidates who supported him lost to challengers.
Witherspoon left on June 30, according to a separation agreement that spells out how he would get an extra full year’s $258,121 salary, six months’ health insurance and all accrued annual leave upon his departure.
Look, the buck has to stop somewhere and all managers are responsible through their last day for duties assigned to them. That means there may be reasons for students not having laptops, but there are no excuses. That’s especially so with Witherspoon getting gobs of taxpayer money for just walking out the door. (That’s a whole other column, one I’ve written before.)
The bottom line is that the Richland 1 administration failed its students, broadly and miserably.
The notion that this fiasco is unacceptable is not lost on Walker.
In advising the board and the public about the laptop shortage at the board’s Aug. 19 meeting, Walker said, “This is a predictable thing. We know that students are going to need laptops every year at the beginning of the year, and it’s a solvable issue, and we will solve it.”
That is true, of course. Everyone knows laptops are crucial and when the school year starts.
This never should have happened. But it did, and it’s Walker’s first test as superintendent.
‘Why did we get here?’
How quickly — and transparently — this issue is resolved is worth watching.
For the time being, the district said, it is “utilizing laptop carts among classrooms to encourage collaborative use of technology and balancing this with traditional instructional materials, including physical textbooks. Our educators are effectively integrating digital and print resources to ensure uninterrupted, high-quality instruction while we work to address device availability.”
Effectively? Riiiight. How can the district assess its laptop usage if it doesn’t even know how many laptops it has?
Enough parents complained to board members to show that the word “effectively” is just pure spin.
Only two board members and one parent addressed the laptops at the Aug. 19 meeting. The board members thanked the superintendent for his approach. The parent sounded skeptical.
“I look forward to what that solution will be and how you will lay it out so that the community will know that, if it was a delay, then it means we need to do it earlier as you have stated,” board member Aaron Bishop said. “Thank you for facing it as our leader and our superintendent.”
“I also want to extend my gratitude for you’ve dealt with this issue, and we really appreciate it,” board Chairman Robert Lominack said.
It was an underwhelming response from board leaders tasked with protecting taxpayers’ money and safeguarding student learning. While no school board member pressed Walker, a mother of three Richland 1 students, including two middle schoolers, raised a number of questions.
She said her sixth and seventh graders were told there were not enough laptops for students to take home last month and that they would have to share laptops with students in other classes so “children are going to use them maybe two days a week.” She called that “a big concern.”
Asked last week if students had access to laptops just twice a week, the district didn’t answer.
At the meeting, the parent wondered aloud if the new laptops would be “sufficient for us to meet the digital initiative that we have to make sure that every student has one laptop,” and added, “I do still have concerns about how many laptops we have.” But she said, her “real question” was “Why did we get here?”
The parent kept asking questions and outlining concerns until her microphone suddenly cut out mid-sentence and her voice couldn’t be heard. The board chair then thanked her for speaking.
Let me add my thanks as well. This parent is asking district officials the right questions in public about a damaging, embarrassing laptop shortage that could and should have been avoided.
Matthew T. Hall is McClatchy’s South Carolina opinion editor. Email him at mhall@thestate.com.