Crumbs, pet hair and goo: Student computers get summer love in unseen Louisiana school effort

The tools of this summer job were positioned all around recent Ascension Parish high school graduates Kylon Hardin and Gabriel Keller as they worked at a library table: rags, rubbing alcohol, a plastic paint scraper and a pick, and an adhesive remover in a spray bottle called Goo Gone.

Far from flipping burgers in a greasy kitchen or cutting grass in sweltering heat, the 18-year-olds were in the quiet air conditioning of the St. Amant High media center on a recent June morning, participating in the tail end of a complicated assembly line spread across the parish and underway for weeks.

Since late May, the teens, other workers and some contractors have been prepping or replacing more than 25,000 student laptops and Chromebooks districtwide for the new school year, giving them needed physical repair, digital refreshing and general TLC to make the old somewhat new again for the fall.

As Louisiana public schools have moved to one-on-one devices for hundreds of thousands of students, efforts similar to Ascension's process are happening in districts across the state to rehabilitate or fully replace devices in a generally unseen effort during the summer, some school technology officials said.

Carlos Williams, director of technology for next-door Livingston Parish public schools, said that though districts have been expanding the use of computers for years, he believes COVID and demand for more remote learning drove the numbers far higher, far more quickly.

Counting student and teacher devices and the variety of other computing equipment now in schools, Williams said the number of places where students and staff interact with a device has risen from 30,000 to more than 70,000 during his past seven years as director.

"It just bloomed," he said.

All of those points need to be maintained and even potentially replaced, Williams said.

While plenty of that work happens during the school year, summer is time for the big refresh, Williams and others noted.

Unlike Ascension schools, which mostly does the computer work at the school level, the work in Livingston Parish is focused on the district's central office, as reconditioned devices are shipped back and forth between about 48 school sites and the central office in the town of Livingston.

Williams said his technology staff is supplemented with temporary workers in the summer who can clean and reimage up to 1,000 computers a day.

"We probably this year will have done about 15,000," he said.

Reimaging means that devices are wiped clean internally of the past years’ downloads and other activities.

Contractors handle repair work for computers under warranty, he said.

In Assumption schools, which has about one-tenth the student enrollment of Ascension or Livingston, two technicians were expected to inventory, assess and wipe all student Chromebooks, around 3,100, a system spokeswoman said.

A warranty provider does major repairs, while about 625 computers are replaced with new ones each year.

In Ascension, around five teams of about six or seven workers that include a combination of regular staff and temporary student workers rotate throughout Ascension's 34 schools.

On that June morning at St. Amant High, Hardin and Keller were toiling on the exterior details on a few laptops as other students worked on an earlier phase of the process, follow-up work on the laptops' software following the reimaging.

Hardin and Keller wiped the laptop keyboards with a rag and rubbing alcohol and occasionally used a pick to work out gunk from the bottom of some devices after they had been reimaged.

Another past Ascension graduate, Finn Schouster, 18, moved stacks of finished computers to a room in the library where more than 380 were already organized in piles of 10.

Keller, who was doing this job for his third summer, said this batch of laptops doesn't seem to be as bad as those in past years.

But Keller and Hardin noted that computers have still shown up with food, dust and pet hair in nooks and crannies. They shared a laugh with each other over a computer with the crayon embedded in its vents.

Also, there's the general stickiness, the duo added.

"And what's really gross, if there are any art students, the computers will have paint on them and stuff," said Schouster, who is in his fourth year on the job and graduated early from St. Amant High in 2022.

Ascension district officials said the assembly line that ends with the final touch-ups in individual schools like St. Amant High begins with the school-level collection of student devices when the year ends in May.

Devices are reviewed, ensuring every computer is touched, school officials said. Those in need of significant physical repair — a number in the thousands that can include those with broken keys and monitors or worse — are sent to a central building in Sorrento where Dell contractors do that work, officials said.

"One guy ran over … (his computer). It was literally in a 'U' shape," said Demetrius Irving, an Ascension internet technology administrator who manages the summer process, as well as work during the year.

Darby Lambert, Ascension's director of information technology, added that the school system keeps its devices on a four-year replacement schedule, meaning about 4,000 a year are replaced with new equipment at a cost of about $4.5 million.

Complicating this year's effort is the big change in the district's high school feeder systems.

To make room for the new Prairieville High School, which opens in the fall, student populations across all grade levels in the parish's east bank schools were shifted. Device numbers have to be rebalanced to match the new student populations before the school year starts, Lambert explained.

"So, we've got a finite amount of time that we've got to get these devices in, cleaned, updated, all that type of process," Lambert said.

Most of the work is expected to be finished by mid-July.

"We'll make it like it's new and ready to go for the new year," he said.