My kid's district, all the middle and high schoolers have personal Chromebooks. He just got a new one as a 9th grader. They even get to keep them over the summer (which is good for kids with limited access, but we have 8+ computers in our house).

That honestly sounds... Expensive

Well, they don't spend money on textbooks anymore.

Yeah but surely the Chromebook, the maintenance costs, the replacements etc make it all much more expensive?

Our district makes you pay $20/year for "chromebook insurance" which means if the chromebook just dies for no reason you _don't_ have to pay to repair it, and if it gets damaged or lost you _only_ have to pay $100 to replace it. I think they paid $300 for them new when they first ordered them...

four years ago. I can't tell you what they budget for it per year since it gets rolled into the "instruction" line item which is $7k/year/student, but it's definitely not a huge fraction of that.

Well that sounds less than I thought, but then again I don't know how much the physical textbooks used to cost

Yeah, I don't know all the math on it either, but the books had a shelf life of 7 or so years, but then you have to figure each student needs them for 6-8 classes a year. One Chromebook sees them through all of high school. With my kid's disability, he does better typing than writing, so it's great.