A patch is to be expected this December

By Brenna Khiev, Staff Writer

SANFORD, Maine – SHS’s internet issues have been affecting students and staff since the start of the school year. Plans are in place to get back up to speed.

“The problem that we see here at late is the number of devices that are sharing that one connection,” said Joan Wright, Tech Director at SHS. “So if you do the math, you’ll see that we’re not really providing internet services to 1,000 students, we’re providing internet access to potential 2,000 or as many as 3,000 devices.”

Problems that occur in classrooms as a result are delayed learning, inability to print and the teacher need to create backup plans and lessons.

“It’s a problem because we don’t want downtime in the classrooms, we want teachers to teach and we want students to get their work done,” addressed Wright.

Kerry Hanson, Assistant Tech Director at SHS, said there will be a patch on Dec. 7 that will reportedly fix the problem.

Wright added that a lot of troubleshooting and problem-solving have gone on behind the scenes. “I think we’ve done everything we can but we have to do it one step at a time,” she said. “You don’t want to do three things that you think are fixing a problem because then you don’t know which one of those things really made a difference and that’s why it seems like it’s taking quite a while.”

Wright said we are provided with a two-gigabyte connection from the main school and library’s network, which is very fast compared to what a residential home might be.

Wright also said the network connection that we use to get to websites is maintained by a combination of herself, Kerry Hanson and Tim Brownell, SHS’s technology coordinator.