The impatient, rapid clicking of the mouse, the huffed breathing, and the irritated eye rolls are all of which hallmarks of the slow internet connection at school that should be resolved by next school year.

The school district has purchased an increased bandwidth for all WFISD schools that will be implemented this summer.

“Bandwidth is the amount of data that can go through lines at one time,” campus technology teacher David White said. “It would be like a water pipe. There’s only a certain amount of water that can go through that pipe at a time, and if you increase the size of the pipe, then you increase the amount of water that can go through. Bandwidth is the same idea.”

The amount of bandwidth will be increased from 100 megabytes to one gigabyte, essentially a 10-fold increase.

Issues with the internet have been prominent over the years due to the “inadequate” technology White said.

“We are supposed to be using technology in our classrooms, but we can’t when it doesn’t work reliably,” he said. “A big part of that is that we don’t have the bandwidth to support the things we need to do.”

Classrooms hurt when attempting to use the internet, physics and biology teacher Brittany Bailey said.

“When I try to stream a video on discovery.com, it will buffer and take forever,” she said. “If I don’t have it pre-downloaded, it usually doesn’t work. I’ve stopped streaming videos because that’s just not an option. Sometimes it takes forever to pull up the gradebook and students will wait for their grades, and I’m saying to them ‘sorry, five more minutes.’”

Not only does the lack of bandwidth create issues with occasional video streaming,s it also affects daily activities.

“If I’m doing a bell ringer at the beginning of class and I’m not on Skyward in that first 15 minutes, it’ll take 2-5 minutes to get logged back into Skyward to check role,” speech teacher Scotty Coppage said. “I curse Skyward every day. It has made the job hard because in some classes, it is really chill and I can log on to Skyward and take roll easily, and then in others I have to stay on top of it every second and it’s hard to take roll.”

Teachers will put off taking roll because of the time consumed by the action.

“The issue that teachers aren’t getting their attendance done is likely due to it taking over five minutes to take attendance,” White said. “When you only have 45-50 minutes to teach a lesson, and you are spending five minutes of that lesson just trying to take roll, some teachers aren’t going to do that. They will wait until later in the day when they have time during their lunch or whenever to try and go back to take roll for the classes that have already gone through.”

With the bandwidth increase, teachers should be able to do roll in 30 seconds without interruptions.

However, White wishes the increase were put into effect immediately.

“It doesn’t need to put in place this summer, we need it now,” he said. “I had to turn off the bandwidth for the rest of the school last year so that my students could take their Adobe InDesign test that is timed. They couldn’t be interrupted with waiting to load the next question.”
Next year, the internet will flow more easily and cohesively within the school.

“Everything will be quicker, more efficient,” Bailey said. “It’ll be great to have something work, because it is definitely slow at times now and that annoys students and teachers.”