According to the National Center for Education Statistics, typical U.S. school districts average about 3,700 students and roughly 7 schools, though size does vary immensely. Today, technology is present in every classroom from smartboards to chromebooks to laptops. The cost of any district’s technologial assets, is high.
Add to technology assets, the cost of equipment used in the facilitity maintenance of school districts (such as equipment used to maintain sports fields, sports facilities, hallways and classrooms) and its clear why there’s an urgent need for schools to track and manage their equipment efficiently.
Not surprisingly, without an effective asset and inventory management solution, schools will utilize spreadsheets and old-fashioned paper and pen to keep track of assets and stay abreast of asset maintenance. Of course this approach, though cheap to implement, come with a price. Managing assets this way is slow and time-consuming. There’s usually a single gatekeeper of information so that changes cannot be logged in real time, and information is not easily accessible to everyone who needs it – and is easily lost. And that’s a problem!
The real cost to a district that fails to implement an asset and inventory tracking system
How big of a problem? You need look no further than the news, to see the results of ineffecive asset management in schools.
Take for example a school district in New York in 2023, which failed to keep track of its assets. Here “Ten assets costing $433,179 were disposed of without any evidence of approval, including a grandstand bleacher costing $40,773, and two floor steamers costing $18,929. Some other assets that were “missing” also included a cleaning system costing $4,420, a wireless mic receiver costing $2,370, and a smartboard costing $2,070.” (https://rcbizjournal.com/2023/01/02/state-comptroller-audits-of-local-school-districts-reveal-multiple-failures-on-asset-management-and-it-security/) That’s a lot of expensive assets to dispose of unnecessarily or misplace.
Similarly in 2025, Chicago Public School’s Inspector General released a report revealing that tens of thousands of laptops, iPads, and hotspots were lost or stolen during the 2023-2024 school year. Moreover, “More than 8,000 devices purchased with taxpayer funds were detected outside of Illinois, appearing in 140 countries including China, Nigeria, and Jordan.”
And in 2025 a Floridian school district also noted the “disappearance of thousands of COVID-era laptops” (https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/03/23/as-covid-era-laptops-vanished-broward-schools-aim-to-keep-better-track-of-equipment/) Perhaps they found their way to China, Nigeria and Jordan, too?
Lost and stolen school equipment on this kind of scale, has massive ramifications. Aside from the enormous cost to taxpayers of replacing these devices, there’s an impact on the classroom, too. Admin must waste time tracing missing items and then replacing them.Teachers must spend time finding a workaround so all students have equitable access to the technology. And students are forced to wait for the use of equipment, causing curriculum delays and learning frustration. It’s just not feasible for staff to implement their lesson effectively in the time assigned, when half the class are missing a laptop.
The time and cost to implement an asset tracking solution like GoCodes Asset Tracking is a wash, when one considers the efficiency that is restored as a consequence and the money saved on reducing the amount of lost and stolen equipment by up to 90%. Obtaining a solution, requires that the IT department of the district investigate software, tracker options and cost, before they sign up for an account that will work for the district. A solution like GoCodes Asset Tracking will not only be easy to use, but its mobile first software means that all staff (from teachers to custodians) will enjoy using it. A great solution like GoCodes Asset Tracking will also provide the QR labeling and a range of trackers like GPS realtime, that can be used to track and monitor every type of school equipment from IT equipment to school vans. The IT team doesn’t have to worry about going to another vendor to source labels and trackers – ensuring that the entire purchasing and onboarding process is effortless.
Asset Tracking Implementation
Create an Inventory Database
Once onboarded, a district team should be tasked with tagging assets. The best time for a school district to accomplish this is during the summer vacation time, when students are gone. Once assets have been tagged, the district will have a composite list of every asset it owns, with images and location, too.
Solutions like GoCodes Asset Tracking, also enable the district to assign user roles to its employees and allow them to access only information that they need to see, too.
Check in/out
Using a solution like GoCodes Asset Tracking, will enable your staff to easily check equipment in and out to other staff and students, by simpling scanning the qr code that’s been assigned to an asset, with a mobile device. That means, when for example, middle and high schools start back in the fall, Ipads or chromebooks can be easily checked out to students. Now you know exactly who has what asset. If a student or staff members misplaces their IT asset, a person can simply scan the qr code to send a public message that they’ve found it, helping improve the likelihood of missing ipads and chromebooks being returned to the school.
Maintenance
Aside from the simple check in and out process, an asset and inventory tracking system allows schools to easily implement scheduled maintenance to extend the lifecycle of a piece of equipment, too. The IT team can simply schedule repeated maintenance into the asset’s calendar and assign the task to an employee. Notifications will remind the employee that the maintenance is due and the employee can mark maintenance as completed, when it’s been carried out. Why’s this important? Not only will maintenance ensure that the equipment is working safely, but it will ensure the equipment achieves industry compliance too.
While maintenance costs aren’t exactly cheap, they can prolong the life of your assets.
And scheduled maintenance is far more efficient than reactive maintenance — saving schools between 12% to 18% by extending the lifecycle of equipment.
Reporting
An unexpected win of asset tracking with a solution like GoCodes Asset Tracking is the reporting feature that comes with the software. School districts create fixed asset reports for financial accountability, regulatory compliance (assets bought with federal funds for example like Title 1 assets typically require audits every two years) and to ensure optimal resource management. Now administrators have data at their fingertips, allowing them to identify ghost assets (items that are lost or broken) and zombie assets (untracked assets) to prevent unneeded purchases. It also enables them to provide the fixed asset data needed for any insurance claims, such as in the event of a fire or other catastrophe. And data can also be used to ensure underutilized resources are reallocated across the district, so that they are in the hands of the school team that needs them.
Clearly, for school districts, a solution like GoCodes Asset Tracking provides a reporting tool that enables excellent financial accounting and that’s essential to every school district’s success, especially when you consider that total K-12 public education spending in the U.S. reached nearly $947 billion in the 2023 fiscal year according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. School district budgets are big and public money needs to be micromanaged. Excellent reporting tools enable this.
Conclusion
School asset and inventory tracking software is a necessity for any school district, today. So, if your school district is ready to find out about asset tracking solutions – begin by opening your browser, and start a school asset tracking free trial, or better yet sign up for a demo with an expert who can answer all of your questions. You’ll be surprised and pleased at how easy a solution like GoCodes Asset Tracking is to use, and just how much time and money it’ll save the school district in reducing lost and missing assets and increasing the efficient sign out and return of assets like laptops, ipads and chromebooks. Just remember, it’s never too late to learn a new and better way to do something, and its never too late for a school district to finally achieve that ‘asset tracking’ grade A!
