Liberal Democrat Councillor for Bassingbourn, Litlington, Melbourn, Meldreth and Whaddon Learn more
by Susan van de Ven on 9 January, 2021
Since the new lockdown started, a number of queries have been coming in about the Screenbank project run by Meldreth Coronavirus Community Support. Here are some basics which we hope might help another community locate and redeploy available machines to their local school.
Recycling laptops for the community
During the first months of the pandemic the Meldreth Coronavirus Community Support group ran a ‘Screenbank’ scheme to supply computers to secondary school students at Melbourn and Bassingbourn Village Colleges, to help ensure that all students would be equipped with home IT in case of lockdowns.
The need was considerable, with about one in six students requiring a computer or laptop.
A team of local volunteer IT engineers, technicians and electricians worked to refurbish equipment donated by the local community. In some cases, new machines were created out of old components, requiring some minor expenditure made possible by local Covid-response grant funding. In other cases, donated computers arrived in good working order and only required wiping of data and updating the operating system, at no cost.
We found that:
Once through the Screenbank team, laptops and computers have been provided to schools to disperse to students at their discretion, with a disclaimer that all liability rests with the school.
Any community wishing to undertake a similar exercise would be welcome to chat with our team to share points of learning.
2 Comments
Hi I work for Villiers Park Educational Trust in Foxton and we are replacing laptops for our remote workers. We have a number of laptops and 1 screen that we could possibly donate to your Screenbank fund. We are an educational charity so are of course concerned about the data being wiped but happy if you could advise if these are of use to you and maybe we could discuss options from there. Thank you Marianne
Many thanks Marianne – that’s very kind and thoughtful. I will contact you!