I don’t know how I feel about this exactly. I have been subbing in the district from which I retired, as well as a few other districts. I travel between schools in the top 2% of state test score results in Illinois, schools with very low poverty rates, and schools in the bottom 2%. This week, I covered for a high school English teacher in a school with a 98% poverty rate.

All assignments were supposed to be done on Chromebooks. Except some students did not have Chromebooks. One had never received one because she needed a parent’s signature and her dad — the only parent in the picture — was unable to get into the school during the workday. No dad, no Chromebook. Another student had mostly given hers up because she’d lost her charger and a new one cost $40. No one had a spare $40. I listened to the excuses. Most were in the category of “left it home because I forgot,” but others were money or “It’s broken and I gave it to them a few weeks ago but it’s still not fixed.”

I am clear that a poor school cannot simply hand out free, replacement chargers. Kids lose things all the time. If there’s no cost to replacing those chargers, they will disappear more often. I understand that less financially advantaged districts may not have extra, loaner Chromebooks (though the teacher had a few of the old, thin, metal ones) or enough people to handle the volume of repairs.

But this issue escapes the radar too often. That poor district would proudly tell the world that it’s students are using Chromebooks and they, too, have the technology of the times. But the wealthy districts where I work have more technology, more technology younger, more technology that can go home with students — my poor district only offers this to high school students — and when students in wealthy districts find their technology has broken, those districts quickly replace that technology. Usually the replacement process just requires a trip to the library.

Eduhonesty: The problem I see is that my wealthy districts and the less financially fortunate district where I subbed this week would both claim they are up-to-date with current technology and the educational practices using that technology. But then there’s “Marina” who has no Chromebook yet in October because of her dad’s work hours and other students who are waiting for weeks for the Chromebook with the cracked screen to come back, not to mention the kids who could probably have borrowed a charger to use to replace the one they can’t afford, but who decided they’d rather skip the work instead.

Yes, all the players in my daily life have technology available to students. But the students with money don’t suffer from technological downtime. That downtime adds up.

That downtime matters.