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LA Unified School District brings ‘iPads for All’ program to a close as FBI opens investigation

Earlier this year the Los Angeles Unified School District announced that it would be suspending its “iPad for All” program after it ran into an array of problems. Things started off optimistically in July 2013 when the district announced that it would give 640,000 students iPads for school.

A few crafty students figured out a way to bypass the built-in restrictions on the devices, then the district realized that it may have miscalculated the cost of the entire program. Eventually officials started to question if iPads really were the right tablets to hand out after all.

Now the LAUSD has decided to scrap the entire plan for good just as the Federal Bureau of Investigation has started taking a closer look at the deal.

The LA Times reports that yesterday federal investigators seized about twenty boxes of documents from the school district. The investigators are probing connections between Apple executives, former LAUSD superintendent John Deasy, and Pearson, the company that created the customized curriculum for the iPads. Deasy oversaw the creation of the iPad program until he resigned in October.

Today, superintendent Ramon Cortines announced that the program was being shut down completely.

“We’re not going to use the original iPad contract anymore,” Cortines said Tuesday. “I think there have been too many innuendos, rumors, etc., and based on my reading of a great deal of material over Thanksgiving, I came to this conclusion.

“As CEO and steward of a billion-dollar operation, I have to make sure things are done properly so they are not questioned.”

Cortines claims the decision to shut down the program today is not related to yesterday’s visit from the FBI. Instead, he says it was simply an extension of the suspension that was put in place in August. It seems that even as recently as yesterday, the school district still planned to buy iPads it had no intention of using.

Interestingly, despite Apple’s recent focus on education and proclamations from Tim Cook on equal access to technology in education, rival Google’s Chromebook laptops have managed to take the top spot in that market in recent months, pushing the iPad down on the list. This most recent decision by the LAUSD certainly won’t help with that.

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Comments

  1. daitenshe - 9 years ago

    When will organizations learn that determined kids are ALWAYS able to bypass something if they really want it. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of iPads and all it takes is one tech savvy teen to tell all their buddies how to get around it and then you may as well not even have the security

  2. theoddshipp - 9 years ago

    What I don’t get is that Apple has complete control of their OS, why not make a custom version for students that doesn’t allow any sort of login feature. Have the logins/downloads managed by an admin, only certain apps allowed that are for the curriculum for the student pushed by the admin. Apple wants a push into the education sector, all it takes is some editing of their OS to make it even more of a walled garden.

    • cdmoore74 - 9 years ago

      Wasn’t the last version of iOS jailbroken? So I doubt Apple can guarantee a locked down school version.

    • prooke - 9 years ago

      It’s already been done as part of DEP. Mandatory MDM and supervision thwarts it all. Supervised mode allows tight control and your MDM can detect jailbroken devices – then in theory at least, lock them.

      https://www.apple.com/education/it/dep/

  3. mrbozak - 9 years ago

    Epic Failure…