This year, students can no longer access the school Wi-Fi, and top priority for connectivity goes to District 99-issued devices. The Master Facility Plan aims to allow students more access to their own data plans; however, while the Master Facility Plan remains underway, students can expect a lag in the Wi-Fi connectivity within DGS.
As mentioned by Associate Principal Omar Davis, the ultimate goal is for students to use their own data plans rather than the school Wi-Fi. Presently, students may have trouble using their own data because cell phone signals do not travel well through cinderblock and concrete -- DGS’s main components. The Master Facility Plan will replace cinderblock with glass, a material through which cell phone signal travels easily.
In the meantime Omar Davis suggested that students download different apps such as Google Hangouts or GroupMe onto their Chromebooks in order to contact friends and family outside of the building.
“My recommendation in the meantime is to find a way to communicate with your Chromebook, if it’s just one of those messages, like ‘I forgot my lunch’ or ‘hey, I’m going to stay after school’. However, if it’s an emergency, we do have phones in the building. I would suggest that students let an adult know, a teacher, any staff member, and we can get you to a spot where you can make a phone call, “ Omar Davis said.
Texts to parents and friends alike often fail to send, and ordinary uses for cell phones, such as Googling something, seem out of the question. Students have expressed concerns regarding phone usage during school hours. For students like sophomore Matthew Malone, using their phones to communicate has become a daily challenge.
“Sometimes, I need to contact my parents about whatever things I need to have going on after school. If there’s just something on your mind you need to look up or, you know, a burning question, you can’t do that either,” Malone said.
According to Omar Davis, DGS has three Wi-Fi networks, including one for district devices, one for teachers’ personal devices, and guest Wi-Fi for school visitors. The bring-your-own-device Wi-Fi for teachers and the guest Wi-Fi are protected by a standard password that administration changes sporadically.
In previous years students could access the district device Wi-Fi on their personal devices. This caused much of the Wi-Fi connectivity to be taken from District 99-issued devices, motivating the administration to make some changes to its accessibility.
“Our policy is, we offer Wi-Fi connectivity for all district devices. Your Chromebook, teacher devices, my computer here, if there’s a secondary device that belongs to District 99, it is allowed as a first priority to connect to the Wi-Fi,” Omar Davis said.
For English teacher Michelle Davis, Wi-Fi connectivity for District 99 devices has also caused problems. Many of her students have struggled to obtain educational tools that require their Chromebooks, despite Chromebooks being classified as priority devices for the Wi-Fi.
“I have had issues with the Wi-Fi in the classroom, which can become an issue when we’re using Chromebooks and Google Classroom. Sometimes, my students haven’t been able to access certain documents that we’ve been working on within a class period due to the Wi-Fi being down,” Michelle Davis said.
As stated by Omar Davis, connectivity problems with district devices can be attributed to the construction that took place over the summer.
“We did find some of that coming back to the school year, where wireless access points were not activated because the line was cut, the line was removed, or the wireless access point itself was not put back in its place,” Omar Davis said.
The large-scale changes that construction brought caused a reboot of DGS’s technological system, an event that Omar Davis contends can take some time to level out.
“Any time you have that type of construction and change, it is common to have some lag as the technology is learning, and unfortunately, the only way to do that is to overload the system with information,” Omar Davis said.
Omar Davis assured that efforts to help connectivity problems are in the works.