RIVERSIDE COUNTY, Calif. – School officials in the Coachella Valley Unified School District are learning the hard way that issuing iPads to all of its students isn’t as simple as it sounds.

The district launched a program last school year to lease 20,000 iPads from Apple to put the devices in the hands of all of the district’s students, from pre-k through adult education, but the move has caused unintended consequences for other area schools, NBC reports.

CVUSD shares internet services with two other nearby school districts in the county, and when Coachella students logged on to the county-provided internet service provider they hogged all of the bandwidth and knocked Desert Sands and Palm Springs schools offline.

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“We were blindsided,” Coachella superintendent Darryl Adams told the news site. “The county knew what we were doing every step of the way. So it was surprising that they didn’t do anything, in terms of connectivity.”

Desert Sands and Palm Springs school officials, of course, were perturbed by the dilemma and complained to county officials.

“They did not act like a good neighbor,” one county official told The Desert Sun newspaper. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

CVUSD is now researching ways to become their own internet service provider, though it’s a complicated process that will no doubt drag down the $42 million iPad-for-all initiative until it’s complete.

Adams, however, seems determined to fix the problem, which he views as a civil rights issue in a district with a very high rate of poverty.

“The technological divide between the rich and the poor is a civil rights issue of the 21st century, and the divide is getting bigger,” he told NBC. “Education can be the equalizer. And I won’t let anything stand in the way of that.”

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It was that same mentality that convinced Los Angeles school officials to issue iPads to student, and the results were similarly bad.

When the Los Angeles Unified School District began distributing the devices as part of its $1 billion plan, students immediately learned how to circumvent the district firewall, and took to social media and other non-approved sites with their new toys.

“One week after students started receiving their iPads, students attending at least three Los Angeles high schools had figured out how to disarm a built-in security lock that was supposed to limit what they could do with the devices,” Alan Singer wrote for the Huffington Post. “This freed them to use the iPads to surf the internet, send tweets, socialize on Facebook, stream music through Pandora, and who knows what else besides homework and school assignments.”

Schools in Fort Bend, Texas and Hoboken, New Jersey have also run into more problems than they can handle with school-issued computer devices and are scrapping their programs.

From the HechingerReport.com:

By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs.

We had ‘half a dozen kids a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going “my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,” said Crocamo.

Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still … teenagers.

“We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”

And just like in LA, Hoboken students quickly learned how to get around the district’s firewall to use the computers for whatever they wanted. The district installed software to block students from undoing the computers’ firewall settings, but students found a way around that, as well, according to the Hechinger Report.

“There is no more determined hacker, so to speak, than a 12-year-old with a computer,” Crocamo told the news site.

Hoboken is now working to record what computers it has left, which are piled in a storage closet, to draft a resolution for the school board to destroy the devices. Then officials will seek bids to see how much recycling companies will charge to dispose of the computers.