We are moving away from families purchasing Chromebooks and bringing your own Chromebooks. It was becoming too difficult and time consuming to maintain and support such a variety of Chromebooks. The lease is $120 a school year. This covers the cost of the Chromebook and associated fees for software licenses.

If you are a current family at VCA , you will be allowed to keep using your current Chromebook. Once it becomes unserviceable or reaches its "End of Updates" cycle, you will be required to lease one from VCA. We will not provide repair service for a Chromebook not previously purchased from VCA.

We cover any warranty repairs. We will also provide you a loaner while the Chromebook is getting fixed. This covers hardware failures, but not break/fix issues from abuse. Depending on the circumstances, we may have to charge time and materials for a break/fix issue resulting from horseplay and neglect. This will be decided upon on a case by case basis.

No. The reason is the ability of a teacher to control the classroom environment and the school to be able to filter and monitor things. Google Chrome is one of the easiest and cheapest to do this with. Windows and Mac would require additional servers and cloud services to manage and therefore add a great deal of cost and complexity to the IT environment.

The school will be blocking social networking sites during class hours, but not outside of the campus. Personal Gmail accounts however are blocked because it will allow the student to bypass our GoGuardian software.

VCA will be using a cloud service called GoGuardian. It will allow the teachers to view student screens during class, close browsing windows, and send messages to individual students or the class as a whole. Categories of web sites such as porn and gambling will be filtered. Regardless of filter settings, the dean of students will get notifications of worrisome web sites and search terms such as suicide or drugs. One example was a teacher's child that was doing a speech on suicide. The admin got flagged and he approached the teacher about it. Once he realized that it was for a speech, the flag was cleared. If you have a website that is blocked that your child needs access too, they will be able to send the admin a request to whitelist it. The first year we did this, we had quite a few requests and added them as needed. There have been quite a few requests for students to be able to add extensions and wallpapers and other things to the Chromebooks. Our IT coordinator is still working out ways for students to personalize their Chromebooks but not compromise safety. Because there are so many extensions that would allow students to bypass our filters, we will always err on the side of caution.

GoGuardian has a parental phone app. After student accounts are created at the beginning of the school year, their accounts are paired up with a parent/guardian email account in GoGuardian. You will receive an email with instructions on how to install and use the app.

We are able to set filter schedules based on school and non-school hours for student devices as a whole. The GoGuardian parent app will allow parents to control filtering and disable internet access from their phones during non-school hours for additional control over their child's chromebook use.

We have had several questions regarding the need for a graphing calculator if the student has a Chromebook. It will be up to the teacher if the Chromebook will be allowed instead of the calculator. There is a Chrome app that will allow a graphing calculator to be used while the Chromebook is offline. We are working on making that a standard app for all students. The online iStep testing system includes a calculator at appropriate times during testing. At this time the SAT and ACT tests do not allow for a Chromebook to be used. We will be regularly tracking this subject as it is sure to change over the coming months. For now, please discuss with your child's teacher about their requirements. This will be news to the teacher as well. We will be conducting training in August before school starts for the teachers.