HOBOKEN, N.J. – When Hoboken school leaders decided in 2010 to use a windfall of federal stimulus money to purchase laptops for all students in the city’s junior-senior high school, former board member Maureen Sullivan was the only one to vote against the measure.     

Four years later, the district’s superintendent Mark Toback has deemed the initiative “unsustainable” and canceled the program, leaving school officials to explore options for recycling dozens of machines that are now collecting dust in a school storage closet.

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“It was clear it was going to be a boondoggle and a disaster and that’s what it turned out to be,” Sullivan told EAGnews.

“The stimulus money came and it had to be soaked up … It was like, ‘It’s free money, let’s just spend it,’” she said of the board’s rush to dole out computers, which her colleagues on the board viewed as an opportunity to help the district’s mostly poor students keep up with their wealthier peers.

“There was just no planning or thinking things through logically,” she said. “In general, that’s how the school board operates.”

Before the plan was approved, Sullivan repeatedly highlighted the district’s already struggling tech staff, the costs to repair and maintain hundreds of computers, licensing fees for software, and the lack of a strategic plan for training teachers, but “it was just shluffed off like ‘Don’t worry about it, these things take care of themselves,’” Sullivan said.

“I asked what happens when the stimulus money goes away and they were just like ‘Our taxpayers will see the value … and pay,’” said Sullivan, a mother of two high school students.

“You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out it was going nowhere fast. They never wanted to hash out the negatives, they only wanted to talk about the positives,” she said. “Anyone with common sense knows you can’t just give a 12-year-old a laptop.

“Kids have all the time in the world to figure out how to mess them up,” Sullivan said.

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And that’s exactly what happened.

According to the Hechinger Report:

By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs.

We had “half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,’ ” said Crocamo.

Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still… teenagers.

“We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”

Crocamo’s time was also eaten up with theft. Despite the anti-theft tracking software he installed, some laptops were never found. Crocamo had to file police reports and even testify in court.

That was only the beginning.

Students also learned how to circumvent software installed on the machines intended to prevent them from visiting pornography, social media, and other inappropriate websites. Crocamo disabled the computers’ webcams, but students learned to undo those controls, as well.

The added software also dragged down the computers’ processors, which prevented them from effectively running educational software.

“We didn’t really do much on the computer,” Michael Ranieri, a junior at Hoboken high school, told the Hechinger Report. “So we kind of just did games to mess around when we had free time. I remember really big was Crazy Taxis that we used play. If we found solitaire online, we used to play it.”

Many folks in the community also learned the district’s username and password and eventually overwhelmed the high school’s wifi network.

Superintendent Toback inherited the computer problems when he came to the district in 2011 and initially tried to keep the program going. But many of the skyrocketing costs, which were not included in the district’s budget, made it impossible.

“The $500 laptops lasted only two years and then needed to be replaced. Toback said new laptops with more capacity for running educational software would cost $1,000 each. Licenses for the security software alone were running more than $100,000 and needed to be renewed every two years,” according to the news site.

In 2012, the school board allocated about $200,000 out of the school budget for 110 more laptops for students, but other “unanticipated” expenses eventually rendered the laptop giveaway unsustainable and officials scrapped the program entirely this summer.

“In subsequent years it was part of the whole budget, and I voted against that too,” said Sullivan, who did not run for re-election and left the board in 2013. “There were a lot of costs. The licensing fees were enormous.”

“I can’t tell you how much it cost in the end,” she said.

That’s because the expenses continue to mount.

Hoboken taxpayers are now paying school staff to sift through the machines over the summer to collect serial numbers and prepare them for disposal. Meanwhile, district officials will be soliciting bids from recycling companies to get rid of what’s left.

The moral of the story: “Don’t be afraid to look at how bad it could be,” Sullivan said.

“I find school boards, in general, are afraid to ask the tough questions.”

Unfortunately, the Hoboken school district isn’t the only one to employ a “ready, fire, aim” approach to technology improvements, with equally bad results.

“ … Districts like Los Angeles and Fort Bend, Texas, who jumped on the tech trend without careful planning, have had problems with their programs to distribute a laptop or tablet to every student, and are scrapping them, too,” according to the Hechinger Report.

Allison Powell, vice president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, told the news site that despite the headaches in Hoboken, L.A. and other places, many school officials continue to jump the gun by purchasing computers without a plan for implementing the technology to improve classroom instruction.

“Probably in the last few months I’ve had quite a few principals and superintendents call and say, ‘I bought these 500 iPads or 1,000 laptops because the district next to us just bought them,’ and they’re like, now what do we do?” Powell told the news site.