DENVER Denver Public Schools (DPS) uses about 75,000 laptops to help educate its students. In a post-pandemic landscape, every student needs the ability to learn remotely. The pandemic accelerated DPS's plans to provide a laptop for every student. With more technology comes more damage and repairs.A department of eight people oversees the care of every laptop in the district. Currently, the district is sitting with 25,000 Chromebook laptops in need of repair. "We saw a tremendous increase in the amount of breakage for a variety of reasons. One being because we were one-to-one as a district, kids were using them every single day," said Matt Dodge, senior manager of the district's Department of Technology Services. Dodge and his team needed to get creative or risk being overwhelmed by the mountain of broken laptops. Starting last year, the district enlisted the help of some of its 18-21 Transition Program students to help out.The program caters to DPS students with disabilities who need help learning social and work skills for life after high school. "It's incredibly beneficial to us as a team to have extra sets of hands in it. For us, it's an exciting story to tell other schools, as well, that these Chromebooks were repaired by other students across DPS," said Dodge. Frank Leone, a student in the program, loves knowing how things work. The class gave him enough confidence to take a leadership role among his classmates. While students are repairing laptops, Frank roams around the room to give them help and advice. "It just basically leads to new opportunities from a little bit of help, a little bit of extra help," said Leone. Leone, like his classmates, is hungry to learn more about computer repair and themselves. "It's a great program to be enrolled in, especially for, you know, mentally or physically disabled students," Leone said. "It just feels good to build stuff because it just goes to show confidence builds up. And inside your mind, it just feels good."DPS runs the 18-21 Transition Program across multiple campuses. It hopes to soon recruit more students in the program from across the district to help with repairs. In the meantime, students will carry their new skills and confidence into life outside of the classroom.