The current district-wide Wi-Fi issues across most of the Atlanta Public Schools system have proven to be increasingly problematic for both students and teachers.
With the recent change in the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) policy regarding Personal Electronic Devices (PED) policy), students are no longer allowed to bring personal laptops to school. This sharp decline in personal computers has caused an increase in the usage of school Chromebooks that use the school Wi-Fi, thus putting extra strain on the APS Wi-Fi system. The current district-wide Wi-Fi issues across most of the Atlanta Public Schools system caused by this extra usage, have proven to be increasingly harmful for both students and teachers.
Technology is a predominant part of education, yet many students are unable to access the opportunities provided by the Chromebooks Midtown and APS pay so much for. With the majority of school work now being online, students are facing stress as they are unable to access the Internet.
To complicate matters, many students were given a faulty computer at the beginning of the school year. These computers don’t have the ability to connect to a Wi-Fi domain under the APS jurisdiction. Due to every public school in the metro Atlanta area being on the same server. The issue is within each individual device, the faulty ones don’t have the ability to connect to the APS wi-fi router’s bandwidth. This has been an issue since June 25th of this year, when Chrome updated the laptops.
These inoperable computers have added stress and pressure for students dealing with this problem. Kids have had an influx of additional work to do at home due to the fact that they can’t get most classwork done at school. This has become quite the issue for many, and isn’t acceptable considering the fact that classwork is designed to be done in school with a teacher and certain learning tools as resources.
Additionally, the inability to get their class work done is now affecting students’ home lives to a greater extent. With not many teachers assigning work on paper, students are having to wait until they get home to complete assignments designed to be done in a classroom with a teacher’s help. The affected students are already facing the threat of falling behind in school as a result of having an overload of homework.
The process of replacing these defective devices has become a challenge due to a lack of replacement computers. With the school running out of replacement computers, students are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the newest shipment of computers. However, there is no saying for when the shipment will arrive, leaving many students under stress. An estimated 300+ computers have already been broken, and each replacement computer costs $250. This means the administration is spending roughly $75,000 for Midtown’s computer issues alone. The IT department has been working on this issue for over a week now, leaving fewer, but still many students without a properly functioning device.
Not only are students being affected by the issues, as teachers are also facing a series of problems. Instead of having a complication-free assigning and grading system, teachers have had to alter lesson plans and assignments around this dictating issue. This means that classes as a whole are being directly affected by this issue. The content for many courses has been temporarily altered to cater to the absence of working computers, which has thus set back plans for the course. For some classes it may not be a big change, but for other classes noticeable changes have been set in place that have shown to be extremely harmful to education and the mental well-being of students.
