Why is broken okay?

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In my school (and also in the four other schools in my district), the Internet has been going down regularly for four weeks. Every day (except for one lucky and glorious day) for these past weeks, the Internet has been down more than it’s been up. Things that are housed on our own servers (such as internal email and thankfully Destiny, our library management system) have stayed functional most of the time. The wifi, though, is down most of the time. Did I mention that we’re a 1:1 school? For weeks, our students have been carrying around their laptops, hoping they might work for a very short time during the course of the day.

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Those of you in schools can imagine the chaos this creates in learning, teaching, planning, collaborating, grading, communicating, and every other aspect of school life. Those of you not in the field of education are probably scratching your heads, thinking, “How is this even possible?” In the corporate world, this would not happen. Plain and simple. I’m married to an IT guy, and I know that if this happened in his office, he would have been out of a job weeks ago. The company would have immediately done whatever it took, brought in outside resources to fix things, and return to business as usual.

Why is it okay in education? Why is it okay for our students and our teachers? We are constantly hearing stories about terrible conditions in schools, about lack of funding and lack of resources. We’re also seeing great teachers leave the profession because of the conditions, the frustrations, the general lack of respect — and you honestly can’t blame them. Obviously, I don’t have the solution, but something’s got to give. Unfortunately, I can’t even get an answer as to why our Internet keeps going down after four weeks. And it’s really not okay.

5 thoughts on “Why is broken okay?

  1. We are also a 1:1 school district. Just the other day, a couple teachers and I were talking about how are we really 1:1 if most of our equipment is broken? So frustrating when you plan a lesson or unit to have to then “think on the fly”.

  2. This happened last year at my school, for most of the year the internet was down or was so slow it was unusable. Comcast blamed the school but in the end it was an internal error at Comcast that took them most of a school year to fix.

  3. You are not alone. We are a 1:1 district with the same issue. My husband says the same thing yours does. In private industry, someone would be fired.

  4. I feel exactly the same way. My husband is also an IT guy. I see the funds and items they purchase for his business and wonder why I have to try to put components together to try to get them to work. It’s not ok for our schools and like you I don’t have the answers either.

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