Sep. 10—ROCHESTER — Rochester Public Schools has been awarded nearly $250,000 in a lawsuit it filed earlier this year against a Georgia company over iPads.
The district was awarded a default judgment on Sept. 9, 2024, totaling $247,265. According to court documentation, the defendant, Cornerstone Technologies LLC, never appeared for a hearing in the case.
Prior to the court’s decision, the school district had filed a memo in support of a default judgment on Aug. 9.
“(The) defendant’s failure to answer this action or fulfill its contractual obligations has frustrated the District because it is a steward of public money,” the memo stated.
The district’s memo went on to say that although RPS “is contractually allowed to recover its attorney’s fees in enforcing the agreement … it is only seeking the past due amount of $247,265.”
The disagreement began in 2020 when RPS sold more than 3,400 iPads to the company. Based on the condition and the per-device price, the total amount the two sides agreed to was $371,765.
From that point on, however, the district was consistently unable to get the company to pay for the purchase. In 2021, the school district worked with a debt collection company to collect payment.
In 2022, the two parties drafted a payment plan, requiring the company to only pay $300,000 of the original amount. Even after developing the payment plan, however, the district claimed that the company’s payments came either late, below the required amount, or not at all.
By the time the district filed the complaint, roughly four years after the sale was made, it only had received roughly a third of the agreed-upon price. The district allegedly hadn’t received any payment from the company since April 2023.
The district then filed a complaint with the court on May 1, 2024.
“(The) defendant has consistently been in default of this agreement from almost the day it was executed,” the district said in its original complaint.
