Wi-Fi is almost to the point where it runs our school. Homework and school work are now online as much as they are on paper. While those students using Chromebooks are still able to complete these assignments without issue, students using personal devices are having more trouble.

Since the beginning of the year, students have had problems with connecting their phones and laptops to the school Wi-Fi. 

“Near the beginning of the school year I was able to get on after trying different combinations for the password, and then a few days later I got kicked off,” sophomore Kaden Conner said.

After successfully connecting to the BYOD network again, Conner said he continued to have problems keeping his personal devices on.

“It would disconnect a lot around the school,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s the way the school is built or if it’s bad Wi-Fi.”

The problem with the network also affected lesson plans and activities for some classes.

“If we get kicked off the Wi-Fi, there’s no signal in my room, so if they forgot their Chromebook, or it’s dead and there’s none in the library, we can’t play [a learning game] because now we don’t have enough for a team,” math teacher Emily Provencher said.

Maize director of technology Clark Fichtl said the majority of students were never banned from the BYOD. Many of them were simply using the wrong login.

“Part of the problem you guys [students] might’ve had at the beginning of the year is we had the intention of joining Google and active directory [. . .] where the usernames would be the same,” Fichtl said.

Some students said they were concerned that they were blocked from the Wi-Fi and unable to connect due to the widespread use of VPN’s and the leak of the secure network password.

“Some of y’all might have been blocked previously last year […] we blacklisted anyone connected to secure [network],” Fichtl said.

To log in to the BYOD network, students can use their eight-digit ID as both their username and password.