By: Andrew Dobbie & The Centennial Sr PS Community
Centennial Senior Public School serves a community of 750 students in downtown Brampton, Ontario. It is home to one of the PDSB Regional Science & Technology programs for students in grades 6 to 8. A unique feature of this program is an elective program called STCORE. STCORE permits students to explore their passions each week in service of others in the community. One STCORE example is the Tech Stewardship elective. Tech Stewardship consists of students from grade 6, 7, and 8 who are interested in learning about computer hardware and software, as well as giving back to their community.
Tech Stewards, with the help of Renewed Computer Technology, learn about general hardware service and repair of a variety of desktop and laptop computer models.
They also explore how to create bootable external drives, create student-tailored Linux operating systems (e.g., Ubuntu, Xubuntu), and deploy Open Source operating systems onto donated computers.
Our continued partnership with RCTO empowers our students to not only learn how to service their own technology and repurpose it so it lasts longer, but to be a part of something much bigger than themselves. All of our Tech Stewards contribute to achieving the U.N. Global Goals through repurposing obsolete computers with Linux, servicing repurposed computers to ensure they are safe and fast, and teaching their fellow students how to use their new, free classroom computers.
In 2025-2026, we were lucky to receive another donation of laptops from RCTO to further support student exploration and learning in our school community. To date, our Tech Stewards manage more than 240 computers throughout our school community.
Our partnership efforts ensure that more students have daily access to a computer in their classroom to support exploration and learning about the world around them. This helps to improve the quality of education for all of our students.Our partnership also helps to divert thousands of kilograms of e-waste from landfills. This is another way that our combined effort helps to improve our global climate.
Finally, our school can divert our already limited education tax dollars to support student learning because it is saving close to $50 000/year in new technology purchases due to our efforts!
Thank you, RCTO!