On Thursday, September 18th, upper school students and faculty packed into Centennial Hall for the annual clubs video assembly, ready to see the student-created videos on the big screen. Laughter and energy filled the room until suddenly, the video froze. The Wi-Fi had gone down, prematurely ending the annual tradition.
Students returned to ASB, only to find the Wi-Fi still unavailable, interrupting what many students consider a critical part of the day.
“It’s halted any work I could be doing right now,” Sixth Former Henry Biddison said at the time.
“I was going to study for Spanish class, but couldn’t,” Sixth Former Desmond Heneks said. “I consider myself very lucky that I didn’t have any homework to do this ASB, as I normally save my smaller assignments for it.”
The Wi-Fi outage extended far beyond ASB. Throughout the rest of the day, students nervously typed into the Google search bar, hoping that the Wi-Fi was back, but to no avail.
The outage also impacted students’ ability to print necessary items.
“I had to print my integrated essay for English, but I couldn’t,” Sixth Former Quinn Gallagher said. “Then, the next day, the Wi-Fi was temporarily out once again when I was going to print it.”
The problem also affected teachers, who were unable to print materials for class, such as assignments and quizzes. Students saw this first-hand in Latin class, as teacher Dr. Andrew Fenton’s students instead handwrote notes, while students in Spanish teacher Mr. Andrew Poolman’s class took a listening-based version of a vocabulary quiz, unable to take the prepared paper version.
The Wi-Fi outage greatly inhibited students’ ability to study.
“I was going to study for my biology test during my free period, but couldn’t since all the material is online,” Fifth Former Ethan Qiang said. “I ended up not doing as well as I hoped, and I think it was a combination of that and also how I had more homework than usual to do at home since I couldn’t do it at school.”
The outage particularly affected students preparing for reading quizzes.
“I couldn’t do the history reading since I couldn’t access the online textbook, and I ended up doing really poorly on the reading quiz in class,” Fifth Former Kevin Chan said. “This significantly hurt my grade, as well as other people’s grades who were in the same boat as me.”
This incident has made Chan, as well as other students, more wary of the consequences of Wi-Fi outages and has led them to prepare PDFs and other formats accessible offline. Fortunately, most teachers had done so, saving presentations to their computers and allowing them to teach class as planned.
These events beg the question: are we too reliant on technology? Teachers noticed a common dynamic, as students repeatedly asked if class was cancelled since there was no Wi-Fi. The answer, possibly to the dismay of students, was no. Further, students didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to learn without the distractions of technology.
“I didn’t notice much of a difference in my students’ engagement,” math teacher Mr. Stuart Alden said. “A lot of kids simply complained about not having Wi-Fi, and others just played games already on their laptops.”
Perhaps students would need a longer screen detox—or maybe that’d simply lead to protest—but it seems that the world is only becoming increasingly digital, and so is the school.
“Nowadays, everything is electronic. When the Wi-Fi goes out, everything goes out,” Sixth Former Thomas Nye said.
Given this, the tech department has been working hard to mitigate Wi-Fi issues. The outage on the 18th was not the fault of the school, but rather an anomaly. A car crash caused a disconnection in an aerial line that ordinarily connects the school to the internet service provider. It impacted many nearby businesses and schools. This was the first time something like this had occurred in years.
To prevent further long-term outages, the tech department has installed a secondary line for internet service.
“Much of the current technology and systems were put in place almost a decade ago, and they have difficulties sustaining the greater load.”
Mr. Jonathan Barnes
“As a preventative measure moving forward, we signed a contract with another provider that uses a different line to the school. That way, if the primary one goes down, we have this secondary one to come online,” Network Manager Mr. Jonathan Barnes said. “Even though the chances of needing to rely on it are slim, the school understands the importance of having this backup, so the finances are not an inhibitor. Wi-Fi is a necessary construct for the school’s services.”
The tech department looks to a complete renewal of the school’s internet system, as the demand for Wi-Fi has continuously increased.
“Much of the current technology and systems were put in place almost a decade ago, and they have difficulties sustaining the greater load,” Mr. Barnes said. “A major area for improvement is the access points—little devices on the ceilings of classrooms that allow laptops and such to connect to the internet. We are looking to move to a new brand and to also install them in every classroom.”
Currently, only about half of the classrooms have access points.
“Having access points in every classroom would remove the need for neighboring classrooms to share them,” Mr. Barnes said.
The middle school, built in 2020, has access points in every classroom.
“We’ve noticed that the middle school has had significantly fewer issues with Wi-Fi, whether it be short disconnections or very slow speeds,” Mr. Barnes said.
This renovation would likely come in the summer of 2026, so it doesn’t disturb the community, as it’s a rather invasive and extensive process, doing work on the ceilings of classrooms, reprogramming ports, testing, and more.
In the meantime, the tech department has been making smaller changes to refine the current system.
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