Discussions

Thank you to those who replied to my question about criteria for the acquisition of second monitors for our audit of our tools of the trade policy. 

As a follow up, my CFO asked about what schools are doing for cell phones.

Over 12 years ago, the school began providing cell phones for a small number of our faculty, staff, and administration. This was back when cell phones were novel and these were primarily our Upper School advisors and members of our security team. We are still providing phones for this group. Additionally, our facilities department has created a second contract and is providing phones and service for the supervisors within this group. We have a third class of users who are provided a monthly reimbursement with those employees acquiring and maintaining their own personal phones.

We are wanting to streamline and my CFO would like to move away from the school purchasing and maintaining school-owned phones if possible. We do understand that there are HR issues around phone reimbursements, etc.

How are you handling this within your schools? Have you made any changes to the way that you have been dealing with this at your schools?

Thank you in advance.

Vinnie

Thanks, this is a timely topic as we are in the same situation. We have always (over 25 years) provided school cell phones if desired for members of our administrative team, our head of facilities and campus facilities supervisors, our security team, and extended day/summer programs director. Not all the admin team members use a school-provided phone. But our policy is that school-provided phones go in our MDM so we have control of them as they are technically the property of the school. This is where it gets difficult because most people will use their school-issued cell phones for personal and work use. So we are considering moving to a reimbursement model but we would not cover the entire monthly cost of a cell plan because a lot of the use will be for personal matters. I'm interested to hear how other schools are handling this!