School Board working towards strong connectivity across the board

Has your school’s Wi-Fi been dropping like its hot?

The Wi-Fi connection has been varying when it comes to connectivity and strength in School District 57’s high schools.

That’s according to a six-month study, which was ‘unofficially’ conducted by social studies and geography teacher, Glen Thielmann.

While the study shows some of the area high schools having a favourable wireless connection, there’s a few, like D.P. Todd Secondary, that has a network that is less than ideal.

How’s the wifi in #sd57 you ask? Well, after spending some quality time in the high schools over the last 6 weeks, here’s my unofficial unsanctioned report: pic.twitter.com/XHRlkzD26n

— Glen Thielmann (@gthielmann) March 6, 2019

Thielman states in a Twitter thread that connecting to Todd’s network isn’t even worth it.

“Hard to get a device recognized, hard to connect, drops nonstop, low bandwidth, won’t reconnect,” reads one Tweet.

While the findings of the study are unofficial, Marilyn Marquis-Forster, Superintendent for SD57 says, “I do believe what it draws attention to is that we do have different Wi-Fi capabilities depending on the high school.”

She adds, “that’s part of the reason why we have included in our strategic plan a work toward ensuring that all of our school have the Wi-Fi access that they need, and we’re working on that and we know it’s a priority.”

Forster states the issue may stem from the unexpected growth and demand of a reliable network.

“Over the last ten years, our decentralized budget process provided a basic set of communication tools, and then schools made decisions about priorities,” she says. “The demand on Wi-Fi has just grown in leaps and bounds in the last five years, probably greater than what was anticipated, and so some schools have found themselves in pretty good shape with their investments and others schools are finding themselves needing to catch up.”

“We as a district do have a committee working on this, and we as a district do have a commitment to moving forward with assisting all of our schools to reach a standard of Wi-Fi availability that makes work convenient.”

The school board’s Strategic Plan is 2016-2021, with the hope of having goals related to each school’s network being achieved by the end of that timeline.

“Whenever anyone is using Wi-Fi in 2019, we expect it to be instantaneous,” says Forster. “Whenever anything is a little bit inconvenient, it always feels frustrating. I don’t believe at this time that students’ learning is being adversely affected. It’s a convenience factor, and it’s also one of our goals because when it is seamless there will be new possibilities for using connectivity in our lesson planning and for our students as they research, explore, and create.”