The Oak Ridge Board of Education on Monday will consider buying $1.36 million worth of “one to one” computing devices for middle school students and teachers.
The purchase of the 1,636 devices would be through a $1.59 million, four-year CalFirst equipment lease that the school board will also consider on Monday.
The BOE will consider buying 1,520 student devices worth $1,223,600 from Personal Computer Systems, or PCS, in Louisville, Tennessee. The Lenovo 11E Yoga convertible laptops are worth $805 each and would be used by students in grades 5-8.
Teachers in grades 5-8 would get 116 devices worth $135,140 from PCS. Those devices, worth $1,165 each, would be Lenovo Yoga 12s.
Oak Ridge Schools received four bids, and PCS had the lowest bid. Two companies retracted their bids, according to information included in the agenda for Monday’s meeting.
“The purchase will be pending passing of the Fiscal Year 2016 budget with the required funding,” the information said.
It’s Phase I of what is known as the Access Oak Ridge Technology Project.
Also Monday, the school board will consider updating the budget for the fiscal year that started July 1 to include changes in projected county revenues and the actual city allocation, as approved in budgets recently passed in Oak Ridge and Anderson County. The Oak Ridge budget, which passed in July with no property tax rate increase, includes a $325,000 increase. The Anderson County budget, which passed this month with a 10-cent tax increase, includes an extra $423,000, according to earlier estimates.
One issue that could be discussed during the Monday evening meeting is whether the additional funding is enough to fund the 3 percent pay raises requested for Oak Ridge Schools teachers and staff.
It’s not yet clear how much the schools might collect in new revenues, if any, from Roane County, where a 30-cent increase was anticipated in a budget that passed in July, but where, at last report, a property tax rate hadn’t been set.
The BOE meeting starts at 6 p.m. Monday, August 24, in the Robert J. Smallridge School Administration Building at 304 New York Avenue. See the agenda here.
More information will be added as it becomes available.
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