I think a simple fix would be a psychological, not technical one. Simply, it's "their" laptop. They don't return it at the end of the year and if they keep it in good form, then they have one. If they don't; they don't.

And when they don't, what? The workhouse?

They'll get a crappier bulky version.

So like the office then? Your 12" light laptop that you use for travel breaks? No worries, here is a 17" 8 year old machine that will break your back carrying around everywhere, and cant be used on a airplane.

My work has solved this problem by making everyone have the crappy huge laptop. 7000+ employees, everyone gets to choose from a menu of one.

That approach doesn't really work with children.

Removing student access to technology is overly punitive and does not support the intended learning and development outcomes of attending school.

To ostracize a child because they damaged their laptop is psychological abuse.

We can just help them take better care of it and reinforce the reasons why and train them to do so! :-)

The reality is some people take care of their stuff others dont.

I see adults with absolute garbage looking iPhones. Some people just do not care. Others do. There is some amount of 'psychological' you can do to fix some of it. But at the end of the day you will have a mix of 'sorta broke', 'broken', 'did you ever take it out of the box'.

Then on top of that. There is a level of junk products. I have a high end laptop I absolutely baby. That thing is a piece of rubish and in a year or so I am going to gladly get rid of it. It has major defects ~2 years in. The previous 3 laptops I had were in very good condition for 5+ years each until the plastic literally started detreating. The same ODM's making that laptop are also making chromebooks. My only option to fix this is by buying used parts of sites like ebay. Or be without my primary computer for 4-8 weeks. Chromebooks margins have to be decently thin or they would not sell them that cheap. Which probably means the things are kind of junk too.

Mildly. Some classes had MacBook airs, which were a bit more durable to the sorts of abuse that would happen, but they costed 3x as much, and didn’t take 3x the punishment. I can’t imagine a solution beyond ‘give them the cheapest thing possible’ which happens to still be chromebooks.