Dear Apple Employees,
I recently took over an international school's technology program. The school loves MAC products and currently has about 70 iPads for students in the Preschool & Kindergarten years as well as teachers. In addition, we have over 20 MacBook Airs. Our teachers recently noticed that Apple now requires a credit card in order to have an active iTunes account to download anything from the app store. This includes standard apps that come preinstalled on a MacBook Air but occasionally require updates. Our teachers obviously are not comfortable entering in their personal credit card/billing information into a school/corporate computer as it mixes between the fine line of business vs personal. As you can imagine, our business office does not want to issue a credit card information to every teacher who has an apple account just in order to make their iTunes account work to download app updates. It could potentially lead to humongous accidental charges or unexpected billing charges.
In addition, with all of the ipad accounts I believe Apple would not want our school to link one apple account to 70+ iPads. This is especially true for paid purchases. Similar to the macbooks our school can't link a credit card to 70 apple iPads and we have no way currently to issue our students with Apple iTunes accounts.
The reason why we are having all of these issues is because the country I reside in (Sri Lanka) is not a listed country that is allowed to register for Apple's VPP program. I know this is the recommended solution and would easily solve everything above I described; however, Apple does not have it listed as one of the available countries even though we are a US international school. What would Apple recommend a school who is in a situation such as ours so that we can abide by their policies but still be able to use their Apple products effectively within the classroom? Currently, we are at a standstill due to not having access to the Apple Store for our iPads or Macbook airs...
Please advise.
