On July 19, 2025, the district sent an email on new upcoming rules at Tam. The topic? Personal devices. Starting the 2025-26 school year personal devices were going to be banned from the Wi-Fi, and from the school.

Why is this ban necessary? According to Senior Director of IT Rose Chavira. “It’s smoother for instruction to happen in a classroom with only Chromebooks. It makes for a standardized experience for the students as well.”

While standardizing chromebooks might seem like a good option, the data says otherwise, according to a March Redwood Bark survey, 50% of students reported 1 or more issues with chromebooks in only the last month alone. 

While this might not seem like a lot, it adds up, and these issues can limit learning in the classroom and slow people down. The district would save money and time if IT was only dealing with people who didn’t use personal devices

As of now, Redwood is finally upgrading their computers to the Lenovo 14e, a slightly faster computer. How fast? On a common computer benchmark, the Lenovo 14e scored a 1309. For comparison, a modern MacBook scores 14861 on the test. In practice, a 1309 means it struggles at simple multitasking, using google docs, slides and sheets become a new challenge. This backs up the claims made by the students actually using the chromebooks.

The next reason for them is Wi-Fi bandwidth, according to Chavira, “A personal MacBook that somebody brings in is taking up resources on that classroom’s [Wi-Fi], and so if the personal devices are no longer allowed to join, it frees up a lot more bandwidth for the classroom Chromebooks.” 

This argument is very feeble and falls apart quickly when you look at the actual data behind this. A chromebook on average uses about 20kbps according to Redwood Bark, you’d think a MacBook’s would be much higher, right? No. It uses only 22kbps.

The main argument though is security, but that’s an easy fix. By closing off the wifi, the district can’t get hacked and therefore it helps protect them from getting hacked. This fails to address the big problem, the device ban. If you’re going to close off the Wi-Fi, how do personal devices come into play? The district here seems to have thought, “2 birds one stone!”

The problem with going for this strategy is that it hurts students unfairly by making them switch to a device they aren't used to because of these new rules. Imagine that your device you’ve which you rely on, suddenly isn’t allowed and you have to switch to a completely different and inferior one.

Doing this creates pushback from students who are resistant to the new changes, a bigger delay in classrooms as there is now a much higher chance of delays in the classroom, and more stress on the IT department as it is now dealing with more devices malfunctioning.

When more and more of those devices malfunction the district is going to end up paying more and more money that could go to our education and is now instead going to support an unnecessary rule.

Now let's talk about the elephant in the room, going off task. This was told to me by my teachers and it was also said in the email they sent out “To promote a higher level of student engagement with the learning environment.” The main problem with personal computers is that someone can just go off task and do whatever they want on it and the school can’t do anything about it.

The solution might be to do what the school did and ban personal devices, but this doesn’t solve anything because students can go off task on Chromebooks just as easily. And as the saying goes “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” And I think this highlights this situation perfectly. Banning personal computers isn’t a real fix, it’s only a band aid and it doesn’t address the other half of students who are using chromebooks and can go off task just as easily.

Banning personal computers doesn’t solve the distractions, it just punishes students who want to learn. If the District truly wants to build a productive and safe environment, it should trust students to learn on the devices that work best for them.

 

Kelly, Cian. “Hitting Ctrl+Z on the Personal Computer Policy.” Redwood Bark, 25 Apr. 2025, https://redwoodbark.org/99280/opinion/hitting-ctrlz-on-the-personal-computer-policy/