Inside Eric Adams’ school Chromebook spending spree in New York City

This article was originally published by New York Focus.

As his re-election prospects dimmed, New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s administration raced through a blockbuster deal to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new Chromebooks equipped with cell service for public school students, despite concerns voiced by senior staff at the city’s technology agency.

The city committed to paying north of $320 million for 350,000 LTE-connected Chromebooks on top of its large existing stock, and for up to one million lines of cell service for those and other school-issued laptops and tablets, according to contract documents reviewed by New York Focus.

It’s not clear that anywhere near so many public school students need the devices.

There are about 793,000 students enrolled in the city’s K-12 public school programs. The large majority likely already have internet at home: A New York State Education Department report in fall 2020 found that 13 percent of NYC public school students, or roughly 114,000, had “insufficient internet access.” A multitude of programs offering free internet to students in need — like those in homeless shelters, public housing, and on public benefits — have launched or expanded in the five years since.

The new Chromebook purchase would have been far cheaper if the city had chosen to buy laptops that connect to the internet via WiFi, since the city wouldn’t have needed to pay for cell service, which accounts for about two-thirds of the cost of the new contracts. (The hardware would have been cheaper, too; LTE-connected Chromebooks tend to be more expensive than WiFi-only models.)

“There’s no reason why the City of New York should be wasting tens of millions of dollars paying for something we don’t actually need when those dollars could be better spent connecting families with the existing programs,” said former City Council contracts committee chair Benjamin Kallos, who in 2017 brokered a deal with telecom giant Spectrum to cap internet costs at $15 per month for low-income NYC families and seniors.

New York Focus spoke to an official with knowledge of the contract discussions, who was not authorized to speak publicly, and reviewed contemporaneous documents. As the agency moved to finalize the deal, according to the official, staff at the Office of Technology and Innovation expressed concern that the contract committed the city to paying T-Mobile a flat monthly fee, no matter how many lines of cell service were actually live, and that it had approached T-Mobile without asking for competing offers from Verizon and AT&T, which are also existing vendors with the city. And it wasn’t clear that the education department even wanted the LTE-equipped computers, the staff members said.

The contract may receive renewed scrutiny under Adams’ successor. Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani has said he intends to overhaul contracting in the public school system, cutting contracts that “seem to have more in common with who the vendors know than what the work is that they’re actually doing.” Asked for examples of wasteful contracts, he has pointed in particular to the Department of Education’s failure to track technology distributed to students.

T-Mobile and Verizon did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for AT&T declined to comment. OTI did not answer detailed questions for this article; spokesperson Ray Legendre’s only response was to ask New York Focus who else the outlet was speaking with. Mayor Adams’s office declined to comment.

A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Education wrote that “Mayor Adams and Chief Technology Officer Matthew Fraser started this program alongside New York City Public Schools.” They declined to comment further on whether DOE was involved in the contract negotiations or how the devices were chosen and tracked.

Since Adams formally announced the deal on September 8, the city has so far sent out “approximately 220,000” Chromebooks to 1,200 schools, the DOE spokesperson wrote last week, of which 71,000 have been distributed to students.

OTI and DOE did not answer New York Focus’s questions about how many of the roughly 750,000 Chromebooks and tablets purchased during the pandemic are still operational; whether the new Chromebooks are meant to augment or replace that stock; or how many lines of LTE service are live on DOE-issued devices.

The city doesn’t appear to know how many students lack internet or computer access at home. But when remote learning LTE contracts were set to sunset at the end of 2023, the education department said that other programs would step into the breach and provide internet access: “We anticipate that families without access to Wi-Fi at home will be able to obtain free or discounted Wi-Fi through one of these options,” the department wrote.

In addition to city-run WiFi programs, T-Mobile itself provides up to five years of free internet hotspots to K-12 students whose families qualify for free or reduced lunch or federal benefits.

The City Council passed a bill last Thursday to mandate that the DOE issue a biannual report to the City Council on internet and device access among public school families. The legislation is meant to make future technology procurement “more data-driven and informed,” its sponsor, Councilmember Selvena Brooks-Powers, told New York Focus.

At a June council hearing, Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said that the department opposed the bill. That same day, the city’s school board voted to greenlight the Adams administration’s proposal to spend more than $120 million to buy 350,000 Chromebooks. To date, the city has paid close to $25 million for the laptops, according to the city comptroller’s records.

“Technology in the classroom brings tremendous opportunities for our students, and reshapes how they learn, connect, and prepare for a constantly advancing world,” Aviles-Ramos wrote in a statement to New York Focus, describing the benefits of Chromebooks. “By providing our schools with updated technology, we open the door to future pathways that didn’t exist years ago.”

The effects of school-provided Chromebooks on student learning have been hotly debated, as public school districts across the country have accumulated millions of them in recent years. Many teachers view the laptops as vital tools for building digital literacy skills, especially among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. But many also worry that overreliance on the devices may be hurting students’ attention spans and their ability to retain material.

In May, Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation banning students throughout the state from carrying their personal smartphones and other internet-connected devices during the school day, citing those concerns.

The legislation doesn’t apply to school-issued devices. “We may have taken away cell phones during the day, but you got Chromebooks for the entire day,” said Mayor Adams at a September press conference announcing the new purchase.

When the new Chromebook contract came before the school board, Tom Sheppard, a former parent-elected member of the board, was apprehensive. “I have heard from many students over the years that Chromebooks themselves in terms of their functionality are really limited,” he said at the June 18th meeting.

Still, he voted to approve the proposal. “The school board is a rubber stamp,” Sheppard told New York Focus, thanks to a majority of its members being hand-picked by the mayor. “The mayor gets what the mayor wants [...] and the members that are not appointed by the mayor, if they push back, it doesn’t really matter.”

Less than two weeks after the school board approval, the technology office finalized a contract with T-Mobile to provide LTE service on the devices. OTI agreed to pay a flat monthly rate of $3.5 million for 60 months, regardless of how many lines are in use, according to a copy of the contract reviewed by New York Focus. That would come out to $210 million. The city has publicly described the contract as a 4-year, $198 million deal; OTI did not explain the discrepancy or answer any questions about the contract.

When Mayor Adams publicly announced the deal on September 8, it was the first time some city officials were hearing about it.

“I was not informed,” Rita Joseph, chair of the New York City Council’s education committee, told New York Focus. “I saw the announcement, just like everybody else, on the news the day the kids got their devices at the school. The mayor’s office did not reach out to my office.”

Joseph said that the city-owned laptops are an important resource for students who otherwise don’t have access to devices at home — but that many students, like her own son, rely on their own personal computers after school. “We don’t use the device,” she said. “We leave it for other families who may not have access. We’re blessed.”

When made aware of the $3.5 million monthly price for LTE service on the devices, Joseph paused before responding.

“Lord,” she said.