District 65's $3.9 Million/Year Technology Operation

The D65's Board meets Monday evening at 5pm, with a $551,135 student iPad purchase on the agenda. More than 1,000 district caregivers have signed a petition by Screen Sense Evanston, calling for less iPad time and for the board to eliminate 1:1 devices entirely.

I want to talk about some of the numbers and the history.

The district spends at least $3.9 million a year on technology: devices and hardware, dozens of software subscriptions, internet and phone infrastructure, and a ~17-person information technology (IT) department.

In the District's FY2025-26 compensation report you can see the types of roles on the team:

Some of these roles are involved in instructional technology and others in operational tech. Just to be clear — none of this story is critical of the technology staff or specialists. I work in IT myself. The reality is that maintaining thousands of endpoints, high-availability networks, compliance with regulations, and security best practices is not cheap.

The question is whether we need to and what the return on investment (ROI) is on that spend.

Background: Leasing vs Purchasing Hardware

The District has a couple of options when it comes to technology - they can lease or purchase.

For operational/teaching hardware, D65 has been leasing since at least 2012. The most recent lease, approved at the December 2024 board meeting, is for $750,966.02 over four years at 5.32% interest — $199,789.56 per year.

The 2024 lease covers hardware the district treats as basic operational infrastructure: replacement MacBooks and iPads for staff ($186,000), classroom projectors and iPad accessories ($268,000), Cisco switches, network cabling, and network closet cooling equipment ($170,000), and district-wide auditorium AV upgrades ($100,000).

For student devices, the district has traditionally purchased the devices. On Monday, the board will take up the memo requesting approval to purchase rather than lease the devices outright;

• 1,300 iPads at $324 each and;

• 1,300 Logitech Rugged Combo 4 cases at $99.95 each for the 2026-27 school year

How It Started: Bonds for Purchasing Technology

D65 didn't always have an enterprise IT operation. It built one, and it used bond financing to do it.

In 2008, the Board of Education approved technology funding through the Debt Service Extension Base (DSEB), a mechanism that allows Illinois school districts to issue bonds using unused levy capacity from prior years. According to a 2013 memo from then-Chief Information Officer Lora Taira:

"In 2008, the Board approved technology funding through the DSEB. Since that time these funds have been the primary source of funding for supporting the implementation of technology in the district."

On March 18, 2013, the board approved a $15 million bond sale, with technology as an explicit use of the proceeds. The FY2014 DSEB technology budget came in at $1,470,806 and grew from there.

Then came the April 4, 2017 operating referendum, which Evanston voters approved 80-20. The board's resolution on use of the referendum funds, adopted April 24, 2017, explicitly committed the new revenue to "1:1 instructional technology at middle schools" and to ending the practice of "funding short life cycle technology equipment with long term capital debt."

In the 2018-19 school year, the district launched its first district-wide 1:1 program. As the FY2020 technology expenditure memo describes it:

Bolstered with newly-committed funding from the referendum, District 65 launched its first districtwide 1:1 program. As planned, the district assigned iPads to all incoming 6th graders for use through their 8th grade year.

In the following year, the district accelerated the rollout, distributing 1,800 iPads to all remaining middle school students at once.

Software: the App Stack

In addition to hardware, the District has to purchase, maintain, and license a variety of software. All numbers below are from the FY2024 Annual Statement of Affairs, which lists every vendor paid more than $2,500 during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024.

Infrastructure and security

JAMF ($71,510/year) manages every district Apple device, the platform through which apps get pushed to iPads, policies get enforced, and devices get wiped if lost. Securly ($58,066/year) handles internet content filtering, with add-ons for teacher device management in grades 3-5 and family home monitoring. Clever serves as the single sign-on layer connecting all student-facing apps and doesn't appear in the ASA, meaning the district uses the free tier. Armis ($27,996/year) provides network security asset visibility. Outpost24 ($15,963/year) runs cybersecurity vulnerability scanning. Navigate 360 ($66,925/year) is a crisis and safety management platform. 1Password ($32,964/year) is the district's staff password manager.

Administrative technology

These are the systems that run the business of the district — finance, HR, phones, professional development — rather than the classroom.

PowerSchool Group LLC ($290,362/year) covers the student information system and Schoology learning management platform, both now PowerSchool products. Tyler Technologies ($243,435/year) runs the district's financial management software. Bloomboard ($270,000/year) manages staff professional development tracking and delivery. Frontline Technologies ($109,221/year) handles HR and substitute management. Branching Minds ($73,242/year) tracks student behavior and MTSS interventions. Smart Tag ($50,950/year) tracks student bus ridership. UKG Kronos ($34,111/year) manages workforce timekeeping. Brightly Software ($34,837/year) handles facilities maintenance management.

You may recognize two of the vendors above:

• Tyler Technologies: I wrote about Tyler a few weeks ago - they’re the vendor currently responsible for the Cook County tax issue, costing District 65 over a million dollars. The County Treasurer, Maria Pappas, is currently fighting a very public fight with Tyler.

• PowerSchool: In December 2024, PowerSchool disclosed that a threat actor used a stolen support employee credential to access records from an estimated 18,000 school districts nationally, including D65. The February 2025 board memo confirmed that student data accessed included names, addresses, birthdates, guardian emails, and health information on file: allergies, glasses, ADHD, asthma, epilepsy.

Instructional apps

The list of instructional apps the District pays for is long — many of the apps integrated with assessment or curriculum. From the same FY2024 ASA are companies like ST Math ($14,928/year), Seesaw ($10,394/year), Newela ($101,968/year), Brain POP ($54,431/year) and many of the apps are deeply integrated into curriculum such as i-Ready ($145,731/year).

Managing the app environment is no easy task — according to a September 2025 board memo, nearly 300 apps were removed from the district's JAMF library in August 2025 alone, and 60+ had their grade-level scope adjusted.

I will say, going through the list, it’s hard to tease out curriculum versus standalone apps running on the technology: there’s a deep integration with curriculum that would seem challenging to unwind. Does the existing math or reading curriculum work if the technology was removed?

What It All Costs

All of it runs through the Educational Fund (Fund 10) — distributed across more than a dozen line items with no single technology total, which is part of why it's easy to miss. Here are the lines from the FY2025 Budget by Object explicitly named for technology:

That $3.9 million is drawn directly from named budget lines. Line 1187 ($944,200) covers the technology specialist and assistant classification — the six tech specialists in the comp table above plus additional support staff.

The real total is almost certainly higher. As far as I can tell, the budget has no line for the Executive Director of Technology, the Infrastructure Manager, the Network & Cybersecurity Manager, or the other senior IT management positions. Their salaries are likely pooled into district-wide administrative lines — line 1030 (Directors) and line 1040 (Coordinators/Supervisors) — alongside every other director and coordinator in the district. There's no way to separate the IT portion from public budget documents alone. What we can say is that the 11 senior IT management positions visible in the compensation reports account for roughly $1.1 million in additional base salary. If that's right, the true technology cost is closer to $5 million, but I can't verify the exact figure with the public documents I have.

What the District Gets for It

The return on investment that D65 gets in return is a genuinely open question.

The D65 Board has already acknowledged screen-time concerns. In August 2025 the district adopted the "Away for the Day" policy - requiring all personal devices powered off and stored for the entire instructional day. Governor Pritzker pushed for a statewide version in his February 2026 State of the State address; Senate Bill 2427 has passed the Senate and awaits a House vote. D65 acted voluntarily, before any mandate.

The district's own testing numbers make this question harder to dismiss. As I reported in February, D65 math proficiency on the 2025 Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR) stands at 53% — essentially unchanged from 47% in 2014-15, before the district launched its 1:1 technology rollout. A decade of massive investment, and the scores have barely moved.

Nationally, the conversation around the impacts of technology in the classroom are building. I wrote about the addition of remedial math classes at ETHS and at elite universities. There was a story in the popular blog Tangle, on Friday about issues with reading comprehension among college students that is heart-breaking:

The article detailed the results of a small study of 85 English majors at two Kansas universities. Researchers had students read the opening paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and tasked them with explaining the contents in plain English to a facilitator. Because Bleak House is a nearly 200-year-old British novel — placing it firmly in an unfamiliar cultural context for the average American reader — the students were given a dictionary, reference materials, and permission to use their cell phones to look up unfamiliar terms. Essentially, the students weren’t being tested on their own prior knowledge, only their reading comprehension.

But even in this open-book environment, only four of the 85 students demonstrated a “comprehensive” understanding of the text. 32 showed a “competent” understanding, but they only understood half the text. The rest of the students were identified as “problematic” readers, almost totally unable to comprehend the passage. Wexler, a writer who specializes in education and literacy, pointed out that the problematic readers’ difficulties came from encountering words and phrases that they were unfamiliar with. Even though they had access to research materials, Wexler wrote, their unfamiliarity with Dickens’s prose style and cultural world were so profound that they simply gave up trying to understand the text. The competent readers showed a similar unfamiliarity with these words and phrases but were “comfortable with their confusion.”

…

Instead, these findings only confirmed what I had already seen among my own peers in high school in Lynchburg, Tennessee, and in college at Harvard: Increasingly, young Americans aren’t comprehending the things they read.

I don’t know if we can solely point the finger at technology, but the timing sure lines up. Screen Sense Evanston’s position is blunt: eliminate 1:1 devices entirely.

The district has argued that iPads enhance learning, but they have failed to provide any evidence to support this claim (and our district’s test scores certainly fail to demonstrate it too). More and more evidence is being presented that screens actually hinder our kids ability to learn.

Before we invest millions into technology as other schools start pulling away, the Board should take a step back and come up with a more comprehensive plan. A month ago, the Board was willing to end the SACC Summer Camp over a $168,000/year expense. At the bare minimum, they should give this spend that level of review.