Building the Systems That Made Digital Equity Possible

The Opportunity

In 2018, Albemarle County Public Schools’ Department of Technology was undergoing a reorganization under new executive leadership.

Before the details of the reorganization were finalized, my supervisor, who was part of the new leadership team, told me about a position the department hoped to create. He believed the role aligned well with my strengths, although many of its specific responsibilities were still taking shape.

As he described the proposed position, he circled one phrase on the draft job description: “Other duties as assigned.”

He smiled and explained that he saw me as someone who could take an unfamiliar assignment, work through the ambiguity, and return with something valuable.

The position still had to be approved by the School Board, publicly posted, and filled through a competitive hiring process. Once that happened, I applied and interviewed alongside other candidates.

Perhaps my supervisor’s confidence in my ability to navigate ambiguity is why I was not overly concerned when one of the interview questions asked about my experience with inventory management. My response was limited. During college, I worked in the store at my uncle’s marina. Each week, he would ask what products we had run out of, what customers had requested that we did not regularly stock, and what needed to be reordered before he made a trip to BJ’s Wholesale. When he returned, I stocked the shelves.

It was an inexact system and hardly comparable to managing technology assets across a large public school division.

Nevertheless, I was selected for the position and began working as Coordinator of Central Technology Services in mid-July. I had been assigned an office at the central office building in the department’s headquarters. When I arrived, the room was stacked with unopened Amazon boxes purchased during Prime Day.

That was my introduction to technology inventory in Albemarle County.

Understanding the Problem

It quickly became clear that inventory was only the most visible symptom of a much larger operational problem.

At the time, the technology department generally made purchases for schools once per quarter. Requests were submitted through a cumbersome website that required users to select products from an outdated and inadequate drop-down list. The form did not ask where the funding would come from, what need the purchase would address, or whether similar equipment was already available.

Consider a common example: a school hired a new front-office assistant and requested a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and laptop docking station to accompany the employee’s division-issued laptop.

The request rarely explained what had happened to the equipment used by the previous employee. It did not address whether the new employee needed a mobile workstation or whether a stationary desktop setup would better fit the position. Schools frequently assumed that the technology department would purchase all of the requested equipment, often with only a day or two of notice.

Without reliable inventory records, we could not determine whether the school already had the necessary equipment, whether the department had previously purchased it, or where those items had gone.

The problem was not simply that we did not know what equipment we owned. Purchasing, funding, inventory, deployment, reassignment, storage, and recycling were disconnected from one another.

Before we could make better decisions about technology, we needed to build a system that connected them.

Building the Operational Foundation

Identifying the problem was relatively easy. Creating a sustainable solution took more than a year.

I organized a team to collect inventory information for technology equipment throughout the division and reconcile those findings with the records that already existed. The work required us to visit schools, identify assets, resolve inconsistencies, and make decisions about records that were incomplete or inaccurate.

At the same time, I redesigned the processes surrounding the inventory itself. We established clearer procedures for:

• requesting and approving purchases;
• identifying the appropriate funding source;
• receiving and recording new equipment;
• storing and deploying devices;
• transferring equipment between employees and locations;
• determining responsibility for replacement purchases; and
• recycling equipment at the end of its useful life.

The work also required a change in expectations. I collaborated with school leaders to clarify which technology resources the central department would provide and which purchases schools would need to fund themselves. That was not always an easy transition. Some employees collecting the information questioned the process, while others who later used the inventory data challenged its implications.

By the end of the project, however, we had created an accurate and sustainable inventory of technology equipment across twenty-five schools serving more than 1,500 staff members and approximately 18,000 students.

For the first time, the division could more reliably determine what technology it owned, where it was located, when it had been purchased, which funding source had paid for it, and where it stood in its lifecycle.

When I finished building the system, I wondered what I would do next.

Part of the answer, of course, was buy more stuff.

Rethinking Internet Access

At the same time, Albemarle County Public Schools was pursuing an ambitious effort to expand home internet access for students.

Albemarle County covers more than 700 square miles, including portions of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the rolling hills and plains of Virginia’s Piedmont region. Providing reliable service across such a geographically large and varied county presented a significant challenge.

One early strategy involved constructing communications towers on schools and other county-owned properties. As the work progressed, however, the division’s new technology leadership recognized that a school system did not have the infrastructure, staffing, or funding necessary to become an internet service provider for county residents.

We needed a different strategy.

Rather than trying to build and operate our own internet service, we shifted toward connecting families with the best available option for their location. That approach became ACPS@Home.

For families living within the service area of an established broadband provider, we worked with schools to promote low-cost internet programs, including Comcast’s program for qualifying households. When necessary, the school division, local government, or community partners could help cover the cost of service.

For families who could not access a reliable wired connection, we began purchasing mobile hotspots from carriers including Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.

Because the program depended on purchasing, tracking, assigning, supporting, and eventually recovering those devices, ACPS@Home also depended on the operational systems we had just built.

My responsibility was to help determine who should receive the hotspots, how the devices would reach them, and how we would know whether they were providing adequate service.

In February 2020, that was an exciting new challenge.

Then March arrived.

An Unexpected Test

Less than two weeks into March 2020, Virginia’s public schools closed in response to COVID-19. What began as a temporary interruption quickly became an extended school closure, forcing school divisions to determine how students would continue learning from home.

In the blink of an eye, ACPS@Home shifted from a developing strategic initiative to an emergency operation.

Fortunately, we already had the beginnings of a plan.

With emergency purchasing authority and approval from the superintendent, my purchasing-card limit was temporarily increased to $250,000. I ordered 300 additional hotspots and had them delivered to my home so we could begin preparing them for distribution as quickly as possible.

We rapidly developed a process through which students and employees without reliable internet access could request a hotspot for virtual learning.

Purchasing the devices was only the first step. Because cellular coverage varied dramatically throughout the county, the same carrier that worked well for one family might provide little or no service for another.

Working with our infrastructure and networking team, I helped create a website through which hotspot users could perform a speed test while connected to their assigned device. Families submitted their upload and download speeds along with information about their location.

That information helped us identify which cellular providers performed most effectively in different parts of the county. Instead of distributing devices based entirely on availability or assumptions about carrier coverage, we could increasingly match families with the hotspot most likely to work where they lived.

I also partnered with a high school Career and Technical Education teacher and one of his students to plot the submitted data in ArcGIS. Mapping the results made geographic patterns easier to interpret and gave us another tool for making informed deployment decisions.

The hotspots, speed-testing process, mapping work, and partnerships with low-cost broadband providers were not separate projects. Together, they formed ACPS@Home.

The objective was not simply to distribute a particular device. It was to connect each family with the most sustainable and reliable internet solution available to them.

Using Inventory to Reveal Inequity

The systems built for inventory and purchasing also helped expose inequities inside our schools.

Our data showed significant differences in classroom display technology across the division. Some schools still depended on aging projectors and required the department to purchase hundreds of replacement projectors and bulbs. Other schools had parent-teacher organizations capable of making sizable donations, allowing them to purchase large interactive displays. Schools that had recently undergone renovations sometimes received updated displays through capital construction funding, even while older sections of the same building continued using outdated equipment.

These differences had developed gradually through separate purchasing decisions, donations, renovations, and funding streams. Before we had reliable inventory data, the full extent of the disparity was difficult to demonstrate.

The new system made it visible.

Prior to the pandemic, the technology department presented the data to the School Board and began planning to purchase new 65-inch displays for elementary and middle school learning spaces. When schools closed in March 2020, emergency needs understandably took priority and the display refresh was delayed.

The pandemic, however, also brought questions of equity—including digital equity—to the forefront of educational decision-making.

As students and employees returned to school buildings, the School Board and the County Board of Supervisors were prepared to resume the work and expand its scope. In 2021, the division began purchasing new 65-inch displays for learning spaces across elementary, middle, and high schools in preparation for the 2021–2022 school year.

What began as an inventory project had provided the evidence necessary to make a significant division-wide investment in more equitable learning environments.

Lasting Impact

Looking back, the most important outcome was not the inventory itself.

It was the operational foundation the inventory made possible.

Because we knew what technology we owned, where it was located, when it had been purchased, and how it had been funded, we could respond more quickly and strategically when circumstances changed.

Those systems enabled us to distribute hundreds of hotspots during an emergency, evaluate which carriers worked in different parts of the county, connect qualifying families with sustainable broadband options, identify inequities among schools, and support major investments in classroom technology.

None of that work would have been possible if we had not first established reliable information and sustainable procedures.

Inventory may appear to be routine operational work. Done well, however, it becomes much more. It gives leaders the information they need to allocate resources responsibly, respond to emerging challenges, and turn a collection of individual purchases into a coherent strategy.