Throughout the school year, IHS students and staff have noticed issues with WiFi strength. For some, Chromebooks just load slowly, but for others, pages might not load at all. Some teachers paused or entirely reoriented their lessons to work around issues.
Administration worked hard to find the root of the problem. Principal Mr. Mike Janatovich explained that the difficulties arose partly from outdated systems. District IT Director Mr. Ed Venetti said that they had a problem with the DNS server and then the umbrella server that does the web filtering. “That’s since been resolved,” he explained.
Janatovich admits to some remaining issues. “Sometimes there’s WiFi (issues) beyond our control. We get our internet through a service provider that works with a bunch of different school districts. Sometimes if their internet’s down, then that causes our internet to be down,” Janatovich said.
The WiFi troubles affected the teachers, occasionally causing them to redesign a lesson on the fly. Math teacher Mrs. Darlene Stefanski said wifi issues impacted her classes. “My second period class, Advanced Quantitative Reasoning, uses a lot of online sources for class, Desmos mainly. It’s a frustration when kids get in at different times,” Stefanski explained. She also found it frustrating that internet problems are reported using a Google Form that doesn’t work during outages.
English teacher Mr. Justin Aranavage said his classes weren’t impacted quite as much. Aranavage said his English class depends more on written text than it does technology. “There have been times where certain assignments on Google Classroom have taken time. Or, for example, today I wanted to show a quick movie clip and that altered the order of class, but for the most part, we’ve worked through it,” Aranavage explained. The biggest issue he pointed out was when he wanted the class to write research papers on their Chromebooks, but they wouldn’t load. He simply told stories until it came back on, not seeing it as much of a problem in the end, “It’s never been out so long that it completely derailed my entire class.”
Some teachers have tried bypassing the slowness with unique, modern tools. Math teacher Mr. Mark Corpuz shared, “One time I tried to use my own personal hotspot.”
WiFi has seen improvement, according to some teachers. Venetti says that he rerouted the DNS server and since then the issues have been reduced considerably. Optimistically, Janatovich said “Knocking on wood, I’m hoping those issues are few and far between moving forward.” Janatovich advised that students check their settings so they can work on their Google-based documents offline.
Janatovich expressed appreciation to staff and students. “I would just like to say thank you to all the teachers and students that have been patient, especially earlier this year, and thank you to the district’s team, specifically [Superintendent] Kelli Cogan and [Assistant Superintendent] Natalie Matthews who have worked to say, ‘We need to fix this,’ and actually went through and fixed it. They did the work necessary because it’s important that our kids have consistent, reliable internet access.”
