Hillsborough schools' laptops are hot items

Is it harder to steal a laptop if the owner's name is engraved on the machine?

The Hillsborough County School District is confident that it is and wants to spend $42,000 putting its mark on machines.

In the past three years, 490 laptops at public schools and district offices went missing, either stolen or lost, according to figures the district compiled through March.

Now school board members say it's time to keep people honest.

One low-tech and low-cost way to do that is to engrave "Property of Hillsborough Public Schools" on the computer.

"You wouldn't be able to sell it at a flea market and say, 'I didn't know it belonged to the school district,'" said Candy Olson, a school board member who has urged administrators to stop the thefts.

If the board agrees to the engraving, the district would pay Hewlett Packard $15 to brand each new computer. The company also would carve the district's phone number on the machines.

David Steele, the district's chief information and technology officer, said engraving "creates an incentive not to steal," as the Los Angeles Unified School District has found by branding its laptops.

It's also a cheaper way to deter theft.

"If the engraving would cut our losses by a third, it would pay for itself," Steele said.

If it works - and if it's cost-effective - the district may consider branding the other 21,000 laptops in its possession.

Although Hillsborough officials say the number of missing computers is lower than in previous years, they acknowledge they still lose thousands of dollars worth of equipment every few months.

In March, the school board signed off on a quarterly report detailing the loss and theft of computers, LCD projectors and other gadgets valued at $21,148.

That's far less than the $92,000 the district paid when the equipment was new.

Of 27 laptops lost from July through September, only three went missing or were damaged, the report states. The other two dozen were stolen.

Some stolen laptops are recovered, Steele said, but the district writes off most of its losses. In the 2007-08 school year, the district lost equipment valued at about $129,400.

"The money we spend on replacing these items is money that could be spent in other places," board member April Griffin said in March. "In this economy, we need to be mindful of that."