The number of ed-tech products school districts use in a single school year has surged over the past five years. With an influx of federal funding as part of pandemic relief aid, schools purchased devices, internet connectivity, and digital learning apps.
But now, the bill is coming due. The time to spend pandemic relief funds is close to running out—states and school districts now have until March 2026 to spend any remaining dollars, although pending litigation could change that—and the Trump administration is withholding billions of dollars in federal funding for K-12 schools. School across the country are bracing for budget cuts.
Districts are left to figure out: Which tools are worth keeping, and which can they afford to lose?
Some, like the Denver public schools, have started to reexamine their array of ed-tech products to decide which ones are still serving students and staff and which should be axed.
The Denver district started the process of consolidating its ed-tech tools two years ago, said Luke Mund, the district’s manager of education technology. Mund presented a poster session about the process on July 1 at the ISTELive 25 + ASCD Annual Conference 25 here.
The 90,000-student district has since reduced the number of digital tools it uses from more than 1,000 to 346, saving about $1 million, Mund said.
“We did not have any coherence across our ecosystem,” he said. “Having 1,000 things that we were doing meant that we were doing 1,000 things poorly, instead of having a focused approach in high-quality instructional materials.”
All those ed-tech tools meant the district was spending a lot of money—about $21 million, Mund said. It also meant there were many points of vulnerability when it came to securing the data of students and staff.
It was time to have a better approach for deciding which digital tools the district would make available for its staff and students, he said.
The district formed a working group that included representatives from the information technology and purchasing departments, as well as curriculum and instructional leaders. The working group found there were many teams that had their hands in approving apps, Mund said.
As a result, the group created a new streamlined process for evaluating apps: After a staff member requests an ed-tech tool, it goes through a series of reviews from the education technology, information systems, legal, content, and data privacy teams before the district decides whether to keep it, Mund said. The district will follow the same process for buying new digital tools moving forward. The full vetting process takes about a month.
For next steps, Mund said the district has reached “the pinnacle of our consolidation,” but there’s flexibility to add new apps into the system, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. The district will also continue reviewing all of its apps every two years.
“It’s a worthwhile process,” Mund said.
