The Student News Site of Souderton Area High School

The Arrowhead

The Arrowhead

The Student News Site of Souderton Area High School

The Arrowhead

The Student News Site of Souderton Area High School

The Arrowhead

The Arrowhead

Network disruption continues to affect students and faculty

Recovering from a network disruption in early September, students and faculty have been adapting to the loss of technology and continuing network issues.

Due to the network disruption, students and faculty have been recovering from the loss of technology.
“I don’t think everyone realised how much we used technology until you took it away from us,” Red Alert adviser Richard Curtis said.
According to Curtis, his students were unable to edit any of the footage they took during the disruption, which limited the abilities of the curriculum.
“I had to get creative with the things we were doing,” Curtis said. “We did a lot of analysis of other people’s projects.”
“ It broke my heart when kids were coming in asking ‘can we do anything yet?’ and I had to tell them ‘no,’” Curtis said.
For computer programming teacher Michael Olenick, his students were unable to access the computers so they wrote code by hand. Since students were handwriting their code, they were unable to get feedback and determine if their code was working.
“ They were practicing writing code but they weren’t getting the feedback,” Olenick said.
According to senior Rachael Fallon, she believes that the class is catching up well.
Yearbook adviser Cheryl Boyda describes the situation as “frustrating” due to inability to access their p-drive and other technology to create the yearbook.
“We’re never not going to use technology to make a yearbook,” Boyda said. Yearbook advisor Cheryl Boyda describes the situation as “frustrating” due to the inability to only having one laptop with access to their drive.
“With not having p-drives, we didn’t have an individual storage spot,” Boyda said.
She believes that it will be harder to create the yearbook due to the continuing lack of technology.
“We’re never not going to use technology to make a yearbook,” Boyda said.
The yearbook class will use Balfour’s online design service, Encore, this year to develop the yearbook.
The disruption also affected non-technology based classes like science and English.
“[The network disruption] has affected the students ability to use technology to do science labs,” science teacher Christine Jackson said. “This has actually affected the curriculum, that in part of the AP curriculum is to use technology.”
Jackson is currently teacher honors physics and AP physics.
According to Fallon, students had to use their personal google accounts for a research project in her honors 11/12 English class.
According to attendance secretary Connie Pasternak, the school is still having difficulty with entering daily attendance online.
“We’re still doing it by hand and I’m trying to enter it as I can,” Pasternak said.
According to Fallon, she believes that students are handling the situation well, and have been able to catch up in their classes.
“I think that from the teachers side it was the hardest start of school we’ve ever had because we were expecting to have technology when we came in and then we didn’t,” Jackson said.
However, Jackson believes it was a good experience for students.
“From the students side, I think it actually was a good experience because [they] were unplugged for a while,” Jackson said.

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