SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – Springfield Public Schools Superintendent Daniel Warwick believes that putting computers in the hands of the district’s mostly minority students is a “social justice issue.”

“I see this as a social justice issue,” he told MassLive about the district’s move to rent about 20,000 laptops for students this year, at a cost of $20 million. “This is an urban environment where many of our students are in high poverty rate situations, and with this technology they should be able to compete with any other student.

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“We are providing technology to bring them into the 21^st century and make them college and career ready,” he said.

Warwick said officials set aside $5 million of the district’s budget each of the last four years to pay for the initiative, which will put a laptop in the hands of every student in third through 12^th grade. Students in kindergarten through second grade will share a laptop with a classmate, according to the news site.

“This is a really important move for our kids,” he said. “It’s something we have been working towards for about four years now.”

The devices will be leased for four years, and will be replaced as the machines wear out and technology advances, Warwick said.

Currently, the plan is to give each student a computer to use at school, but Warwick said the hope is to allow students to take the machines home with them in the future.

“We are still learning, but it has been an exciting process to bring our schools into the 21st century and more importantly offer our students the best tools to achieve success,” he said.

Members of the Massachusetts Urban Superintendents Network are scheduled to tour the district’s schools in September to see the computers-for-all effort in action.

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“It’s a really important endeavor, and no other urban district in the area has been able to achieve this at this juncture,” Warwick told Mass Live.

The plan in Springfield follows similar efforts by large urban school district to distribute personal devices to students in the name of civil rights.

In Los Angeles, then superintendent John Deasy claimed in 2013 that a $1 billion plan to put iPads in the hands of all of the district’s 640,000 students was “a civil rights issue.” District officials contracted with Apple to purchase the devices, and entered into an agreement with Pearson to provide education software, EAGnews reports.

By the end of the year, after the first round of iPads went out to students in about four dozen schools, school board members were rethinking the idea.

Almost immediately, the master plan came crumbling down.

District officials failed to adequately prepare for the upgrade with additional internet bandwidth, which rendered the devices useless in many schools. Students quickly learned how to bypass security features to surf prohibited sites and play games. Teachers did not receive adequate training on incorporating the technology. And the lack of a detailed implementation plan meant students at the 47 schools that received the iPads during the first phase of the roll out faced vastly different rules for use, with some students allowed to take them home while others were required to keep them at school.

The district IT department was flooded with requests to fix broken and unusable tablets before the second phase even started. By the end of the first year, district officials were ready to scrap the plan, especially after critics pointed out that Deasy held stock in Apple and had close ties to executives at both companies.

About a year after the initiative launched, the FBI raided the district’s offices and seized all “score sheets; complete notepads, notebooks and binders; reports; contracts; agreements; consent forms; files; notices; agenda; meetings notes and minutes; instructions; accounting records” and other documents and communications surrounding the district’s dealings with Apple and Pearson extending back well before the 2013 contract, the Los Angeles Times reported.

What started as a $500 million plan to equal the playing field for low-income minority students turned into more than a $1 billion boondoggle that continues to plague the troubled school district.

By April 2015, LAUSD leaders were working to pressure Apple and Pearson to repay the district for the failed endeavor.

In Springfield, Warwick said district officials anticipated infrastructure upgrades necessary for the computer giveaway, and budgeted accordingly. They also invested in professional development to ensure teachers have the means to incorporate the machines into daily lessons, he said.

“They are not all at the same readiness level, but we have gotten a favorable response from teachers when it comes to incorporating the technology into their classrooms in an appropriate way,” he said.