By Max Bleich, Staff Writer

Since the beginning of the school year, BHS students and staff have faced technology problems that have interfered with the daily business of teaching and learning.

Last April, the School District signed a contract with a company called NetOps to aid the technology department with ongoing problems, and to help with the reconstruction of the servers over the summer. However, it seems that problems have continued, even with the extra help.

English Teacher Peter Harvan complains that technological issues interfere with his teaching duties “far too frequently this year.” Both Harvan and many other teachers in the English department have “not been able to print with any kind of regularity this year.”

Digital Graphics Design (DGD) teacher Craig Alexander has also been affected by these technical issues. He claims that starting in the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year, tech problems “have led to some frustration for my students, and the inability to get to the programs they needed to use. Since then, I have been working very closely with the tech guys and NetOps and they’ve been great about trying to be sure the lab was working as soon as there was an issue.”

Alexander continued, “Issues range from not being able to start a program, not being able to log in, or students not being able to access their work.” He also made it clear that the tech team and NetOps have been addressing the issues as quickly as possible.

Social studies teacher Karissa Piper also expressed frustration with technology this year. Due to the wireless connectivity issues at the start of the school year, she made a decision to alter her lesson plans. “I chose to change my lesson plans when possible so that I did not need to rely on my students accessing technology in school. When there was something that I needed students to access on the Internet, I scheduled my classes to be in the library where the connectivity was better,” said Piper.

Technology staff member Joel Freimark explained, “With the wireless problem, the entire issue was much like an onion. We thought we had found the cause of the problem, but once that issue was fixed, we found another, deeper issue still keeping things from optimal performance.  With each “layer” we pulled back (fixed), we found another underneath, and this is why the overall process of repairing the wireless network seemed to take a bit longer than expected.”

The school’s server network was completely overhauled over the summer. NetOps was hired to replace the older, decaying network with a newer, more connected one. All the desktops in the high school are now connected to the school’s network. Instead of storing applications, documents and media on one local hard drive, data is stored on the school’s server rack. Unfortunately, when the new network was activated in August, both staff and students had problems with printing, Internet access, and access to server accounts.  Some of these problems continue to be unresolved.

Freimark stressed that the servers were not the cause of the problems. “In fact, the servers were performing quite well overall, while it was the wireless network across BHS that was the root cause of the issue.  The issue in relation to the servers was a known bug in the operating system that became a factor due to the other changes we made to the district over the summer.”

According to Freimark, any bad publicity that NetOps has been received in the school is undeserved. They did their job and fixed the messy servers. Freimark says we should be thanking them for helping us keep the servers working and solving the little problems that pop up every once in a while.

So yes, things aren’t perfect; the English department is still left with a faulty printer, there remain Wi-Fi issues in the 100/200 hallways, the Beachcomber account has presented challenges and some teachers are still having problems.  But hopefully, if we are patient, these problems will be resolved.