Penn-Trafford will spend nearly $667,000 in the next four years to buy iPads for its middle school students.
The school board voted unanimously Monday night to purchase the 1,300 devices. It will cost about $166,700 per year through the 2029-30 academic year.
The vote comes nearly a year after the district decided to spend nearly $659,000 — about $164,700 per year for four years — to purchase iPads for high school students.
The district aims to purchase Apple iPads for students in kindergarten through fourth grade next school year, Assistant Superintendent Tiffany Nix said.
No devices will be purchased in the 2027-28 school year. New iPads will be purchased for high school students in 2028-29, she said.
Each iPad comes with a case and keyboard attachment, Nix said. The district expects the iPads to be more cost effective than the Chromebook laptops it previously purchased for students, she said.
“The Chromebooks are costing us so much money in repairs,” she said, “so we’re removing that from the budget and replacing it with the iPads.”
Business manager Rebecca Rodriguez, who was hired by the district in September, said she did not know how much the district spent annually on repairs.
“It was getting to the point that, for example, to get the replacement parts and fix them was more expensive than just buying a new Chromebook,” she said.
Despite the expense, it is important for the district to maintain devices for each student — particularly as the Keystone Exam and Pennsylvania System of School Assessment are now administered to students online.
Board member John Otto called the investment in iPads “a good example of expenses that were not in public education decades ago.”
“(This is) an expense that nobody paid for in 1990,” he said, “and we are now paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.”
Board member Dallas Leonard was absent from the meeting.