Outfitting Students For Advanced Learning

Preserving Academics During A Pandemic (And Beyond)

Technology has afforded schools with the opportunity to expand teaching well beyond the bounds of their physical spaces. Expanded access to laptops and other digital learning resources can now ensure that students of all demographic backgrounds can receive the same level of education as their classmates – no matter where they choose to receive that information.

School administrators within Wake County – the most populated county in North Carolina – knew they needed to devise a plan to better integrate remote learning into their curriculum. Housing nearly 200 schools comprised of approximately 20,000 employees, 11,000 teachers, and 160,000 students, they also knew this was going to be no small feat. So, they devised a plan to strategically procure and integrate enough laptops to support their student body over a five-year period…and then the COVID pandemic surfaced and forced that ramp up period to shorten up significantly.

Nearing the inevitable point of students and staff no longer being allowed within the premises, administrators began searching for support in creating additional capacity and increased efficiency in an off-site warehouse facility that was targeted to facilitate receipt, programming, and distribution of student laptops. This is where their local Spacesaver representative was called upon to provide an upgrade to the county’s operating system for storage.

Measuring The Mainframe

With pallets of laptops and accessories on their way, our representative’s main focus was to design a solution that would maximize storage capacity and accessibility for its users. Taking into consideration the warehouse’s layout and the county’s need for dynamic workspace for technical and logistical purposes, they decided that utilizing 4-Post Shelving would be ideal due to its ability to be reconfigured and relocate should needs change in the future.

The 4-Post Shelving, which when paired with bin dividers, helps to create custom storage space for individual laptops and accessories to be housed when they got broken out of the pallets or as they were received as returns from schools.

A More Functional Storage Framework

With these flexible storage solutions in place, administrators are able to better control the flow of equipment in and out of the facility. There are dedicated sections for classifying what stage in the channel – new, for repair, for distribution – each laptop falls under, allowing quick and easy access for workers to get these valuable resources to their users.

Going from what was a mix of laptops and accessories comingled in one location to a neatly organized collection of materials, Spacesaver’s high-quality, long-lasting, and secure shelving units brought a much-needed sense of control to an uncertain time. And now, even after students returned to on-site learning, the warehouse has continued to provide value for the county and will continue to do so for future staff and students.