Persistent Wi-Fi issues at North forced students and staff to adapt to the lack of internet during class between Thursday, March 23 and Monday, March 27.
The school’s fiber-optic cables, located on Cabot Street, were damaged Thursday morning. North subsequently experienced an outage, and the cables were repaired Monday morning.
According to Director of Information Technology Steven Rattendi, the investigation began after the main outage on Thursday. “We identified the cause was a break in cable instead of hardware failure in the school,” he said.
On Friday, Comm-Tract, the repair company, came to pinpoint and confirm the location of the break. By early Monday morning, they finalized the investigation and repaired the cables.
“It would have doubled the cost to fix over the weekend due to overtime pay. We wanted to fix it as soon as possible, but we can’t control what happens to cables out on the streets. The best we could do was keep people updated,” Rattendi said.
According to Golando, “We still don’t know what the cause of the break was, but my hope is that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
The inconsistent Wi-Fi caused schedule shifts and inconvenient situations for students and teachers.
According to Rattendi, uncertainty with MCAS scheduling was stressful, though MCAS on Tuesday and Wednesday was ultimately unaffected by the Wi-Fi outage. “With the high school’s special schedule, it requires a lot of coordination. We did our best to avoid any conflicts, and luckily, we did,” he said.
According to English teacher Adam George, he, along with many other teachers, had to scrap lessons planned online and adapt quickly.
“It was also near the end of term, so I had to extend my sophomore classes’ final writing assignment. I basically had to extend the unit by two weeks,” he said.
Freshman Grace Ahn added that she was planning to complete her work during her free block on Monday, which was when the Wi-Fi went out. “It made me really frustrated and stressed because I relied on accessing the Wi-Fi to complete all my homework,” she said.
According to physics teacher Matt Anderson, since there was no estimate for when the Wi-Fi would shut down for repairs on Monday, he avoided the issue with paper-based tests.
Meanwhile, some students embraced being offline.
“In English, our teacher let us play mafia the whole period. My chemistry teacher gave us a crossword on the periodic table, and I don’t think she had anything else planned,” said sophomore Emma Kogan.
According to freshman Leela Choudhury, classes without Wi-Fi were a pleasant change of pace compared to normally rigorous school days. “In sustainability, we went around the school identifying drain locations and learning about preventing runoff and contamination. It was pretty educational, and it was fun to see lessons outside of the box,” she said.
In addition to shifts in lesson plans, term three was extended due to time lost from the Wi-Fi challenges and four snow days, according to an email from Vice Principal Amy Winston.
“There was some feedback communicated to the administrators. It was good to have that flexibility,” George said.
