Talked to the wife. It seems as if the district determined "need" based on a very specific question about handheld devices; we don't have any laptops/netbooks/Chromebooks, so my wife answered "no," so now they think that our son isn't adequately connected. Shah, right. I shot an email off to his teacher to see if there's some other reason that he can't use a much more powerful desktop (he's already signed in to the Google Classroom and whatnot, so I don't think that there should be any compatibility issues) so that we can make sure that we're not taking a device from another kid in actual need.