We believe that a change is needed in terms of the device policy at Tamalpais High School. Students should be allowed to bring their own devices and use them on school campus without needing a specific reason or confirmation. 

There is more than one rationale for why we believe this policy should change. The chromebooks at school are always sticky, and usually have mysterious substances on their screens, keys, and touchpads to the point where students have to interrupt their learning and wipe the chromebook they were using down because it was very clearly unclean. Oftentimes chromebooks leave a mysterious, sticky residue on the user’s hands, making it unpleasant to even use them to learn. While cleaning these many chromebooks seems like a difficult task, even if Tam has a policy on cleaning those chromebooks, it is not working. Instead of having custodians or teachers or students clean these seemingly uncleanable computers, we suggest people be allowed to bring their own devices to school in order to reduce the amount of gunk trapped in the keys, on the screen, or in the charging ports – because those often stop working too when hundreds of students use one computer in a week. Chromebooks are also very slow-paced. It takes quite a while, taken from valuable learning time, to sign into a chromebook, then another couple of minutes to wait for all the starting pages to load. The chromebooks are not designed or well enough equipped to be used often and by students who typically need to have more than one tab at a time open, and their tendency to crash reflects this. For example, a week or two ago, students were trying to do the Youth Truth Survey (an important survey that reflects the diverse student body's feedback and concerns), but after five minutes, almost every single chromebook crashed and students were forced to use their own devices to complete it, but not before everyone’s progress was lost. For some students, the TUHSD portal itself is blocked by the school the first time they open it, so they have to close the tab and reopen it – which of course takes even more time by itself. Chromebooks don’t reflect the functionality of the school, and they can’t keep up with fast-paced learning. These chromebooks seem to only hinder learning by causing unpleasantness and wasting time by being ridiculously slow and filled with bugs, which is why we believe that a change is needed in terms of the device policy at Tamalpais High School.