Piles of study guides, multiple open tabs and three or four energy drinks are commonplace at a KHS student’s desks in the first few weeks of December. As the approaching winter break glitters moments of hope into the coldest and darkest days, the shortening daylight has not helped the rush to finish first semester. And while most of us have been working non-stop to relearn topics from four months ago, the tech desk strikes again to slow our progression towards the end of the year.
KHS students have been facing new restrictions ever since the start of the 24-25 school year with the banning of Wikipedia and the start of responsive scheduling. And now, right as finals loom ahead, KHS has a new restriction on WiFi. On Dec. 17, KHS released a statement about the issues surrounding changing WiFi networks.
“Last week, I was at Panera to study, and I [tried] to connect to the WiFi, and [my computer] wouldn’t let me,” Addie Craft, junior, said. “[It said] Control Center: Administrative Username and Password needed. I was like ‘what’s going on?’ I need to study. They’re blocking us from joining other WiFi now? I thought it was kind of crazy.”
Addie Craft is among many who have been experiencing WiFi issues while trying to study for finals. Tashia Nelson, senior technology specialist at KHS, said that the issues came from the technology program KSD uses.
“We use a program called MDM, which is a mobile device manager,” Nelson said. “Anytime [a business] needs to manage hundreds or thousands of devices, [we] use an MDM because [it] organizes all of the devices [at once.] For the student population, there were some approved restrictions we put in place.”
Nelson said the two new restrictions put on the computers was iPhone mirroring on Sequoia and the deletion of Apple Mail. She said the tech desk did this because of schoolwide policies about decreasing phone usage during class and because Apple Mail was increasing unnecessary storage on student laptops.
“When [we] make these changes to MDM, it’s not always cut and dry,” said Nelson. “There could be other features that are affected when you make a broad change. Sometimes what we see is that it might have affected a certain percentage of kids on [different days.] It all depends on when each individual student’s device connects to Wi-Fi to get that updated command.”
Nelson said that even though the tech desk adjusted the setting within 48 hours, the MDM had to go through 1,800 student devices, which elongated the process. She said that students can visit the tech desk in order to manually fix the problem, rather than wait for the command to reach their device. While Nelson said that the changes were for a good reason, and the consequences were not intentional, Craft still struggled to prepare for her first few finals.
“It was really stressful because I couldn’t [study,]” Craft said. “I’m the kind of person who can’t study at home, I need to go somewhere. But, the only places my WiFi worked were at my house or at school. It was really frustrating, I felt like I couldn’t properly study [like I] needed to.”
