That all makes sense and lines up with my experience. Schools have a hard time keeping IT staff, as soon as you manage a school district for a year or two you

That all makes sense and lines up with my experience. Schools have a hard time keeping IT staff, as soon as you manage a school district for a year or two you can double or triple your salary elsewhere. So the near adminless part of chomebooks is quite valuable, doubly so when every IT lead seems to want to go in a different direction. I do question the utility of laptops vs desktops. Assuming students aren't on the laptop during every class. If you assume say 1-2 hour a day of laptop time and access to a web browser at home you could save much of the waste of throwing away a laptop every 4 years. LCD panels can easily last 10 years, and batteries are often the first thing to die on laptops. I've built diskless linux desktops for educational settings, with a bit of tweaking was pretty much seamless for users. Literally had a browser, matlab, mathematic, maple, and print icons on the desktop and didn't do any training for incoming students. We'd buy 100 at a time or so and they would last 6-8 years, and each one met the needs of 4-10 students. Cost (and environmental impact) is quite a bit less for a mac mini/Intel NUC and similar SFFS than a laptop.