While the idea of a student personal computer is not original (see “chromebooks” on the home page), the idea of a public school district providing a standardized personal computer for the entire student body is, though the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that equal technology access at home is indeed essential to maintain the goal of public education at home. In the UK, roughly 700,000 students were unable to engage meaningfully in their studies due to lack of a personal computer at home; this represents 9.15% of the 2020 public education student population in the UK (7,650,458 students according to the UK education statistics service), and disenfranchising such a massive proportion of students completely undermines the legitimacy of a public education system.

The Central Okanagan School District is the 5th largest in BC and enrolled approximately 24,000 students for the 2021-22 school year with a 2021-22 operating budget of $302,076,449. To provide each student with a Raspberry Pi 400 home computer kit (valued by authorized industrial seller Digikey at $136.8725 per unit; see figure 2 below) it would cost the school district $3,679,065.60 with taxes and fees added, which represents just over 1.2% of the annual budget. To account for the cost of professional development, an estimate was used based on the 2021 “leadership and professional development” budget allocation of 7% in figure 3 below, which based on the 2021 budget figures would be approximately $21,145,351.43 of expense. Therefore, the combined cost of infrastructure (namely the Pi computers) and training (professional development) of the venture would be $24,824,417.03, which represents roughly 8.22% of the school district’s current annual budget. Of course, costs could be reduced by offsetting the cost of the Raspberry Pi 400 to student families, however, if the goal is equitable access across the school district, this necessitates equal distribution and reselling devices to students ultimately undermines this goal for those already unable to afford personal computers for their children. Alternative strategies to reduce costs could be to renew professional development, Raspberry Pi purchasing and distribution of new devices on a 3-year basis (thus reducing overall costs to 2.74% of the annual budget) both to ensure students have a home computer with suitable performance and to ensure training is appropriate for each age group’s teacher/student use case as they transition between primary, intermediate, middle and secondary school years. Finally, based on the UK figures suggesting almost 10% (9.18%) of the student population went home without a personal computer, costs could be saved by only purchasing devices for 10% of the student population, and training only one representative at each of the Central Okanagan School district’s 44 K-12 schools to serve as the lead Raspberry Pi educator to support these students in training and use of their Raspberry Pi 400 computer.

As staff will be trained through professional development on how to operate these systems, they too can teach students how to operate them from home, and students will continue to have access to the same Google services they use on district Chromebooks via the open-source Raspberry Pi OS “Chromium” browser, which Google proprietary Chrome browser is based upon. Furthermore, the Raspberry Pi 400 units also come equipped with 40 General Purpose Input and Output (GPIO) pins, which students can make use of for meaningful technology education from home. The platform represents not only a homework terminal for students to complete their assignments, but it can also be a creation station where they can experiment with electronics control and design in a way no other platform can, and fortunately, the Raspberry Pi Foundation offers a litany of physical computing projects that students and teachers alike can follow from home. This makes the Pi not only a suitable alternative to other personal computing platforms for basic web-based task completion, but a unique entry point for at-home technology education with virtually limitless potential while remaining accessible to students of all abilities.

Figure 3: SD23 2021 Budget Allocation