During the pandemic, Chicago Public Schools bought hundreds of thousands of laptops and tablets to get students online. Then it lost track of them.

The district's inspector general found that 77,000 devices were marked lost or stolen between 2021 and 2022 alone. That's roughly $23 million in hardware that walked out the door.

The proposed solution was not cheaper. CPS floated a $60 million, four-year contract with CDW to install RFID tracking chips on existing devices across the district. The idea: spend nearly three times what was lost to build a system that makes sure it doesn't happen again.

Critics pointed out that CPS has tried this before. The district previously purchased asset management technology and failed to use it properly. There was no evidence the new system would be any different.

The broader pattern is familiar to anyone who watches school district procurement. A crisis hits. Money floods in. Devices ship fast with minimal tracking. Years later, an audit reveals the waste. Then a new vendor gets a bigger contract to fix the mess the last vendor created.

CPS serves roughly 323,000 students across 636 schools. Its annual budget exceeds $9 billion. The $23 million in missing devices represents a rounding error in a system that size, which may be exactly the problem. When losses that large don't trigger immediate action, it says something about how the system values accountability.

The $60 million tracking contract would have cost more than what many entire school districts spend in a year. For context, there are school districts in Illinois with total annual budgets under $10 million.

Chicago is not the only district dealing with this. Pandemic-era device purchases happened at breakneck speed across the country, with minimal procurement oversight. The full accounting of what was bought, what was used, and what disappeared is still being tallied.

‍