STAFF EDITORIALS
The Voice of California High School

Those students who have needed cell phone Internet to study for a test last-minute, or check urgent email updates know this luxury was abruptly suspended by the district.

For the past few years, students have been able to use the “SRVUSD-Student” Wi-Fi network, allowing them to access the Internet on campus with iPhones, Android, and laptops.

This network wasn’t exclusively meant for students, as a secret password was needed to connect with the terminal. This is in contrast to college networks such as AirBears at UC Berkeley, where students are provided with passwords instead of having to obtain one secretly by word of mouth like it is at Cal High.

It was one thing to have a substandard Internet service, and another for the district to have pulled ours down entirely.

The district concluded students were abusing their Internet privileges by checking out school-inappropriate content and going on Facebook. Administrators were also hoping to stop phones from being a classroom distraction.

But for all the students who’ve used Wi-Fi as distractions, there’s also been a significant number of them who needed it for academic reasons. For most students, they are too stressed with sports or other extracurriculars to do all their homework at home, so they save some for school. Web access made this much easier.

For example, Wikipedia is a very helpful site, with some students even using it in lieu of textbooks, as it is more thorough and to-the-point in most subjects.

Of course, students can go to the library to access this information, but Internet on library computers is very slow, and it takes time to log on. On a typical day, half the library computers have something wrong with them.

There’s also the inconvenience of physically going to the library, as well as limited library hours. The library is not open the first half of lunch, and on many days not at all when it hosts career presentations. With a phone, students can go online whenever needed.

The district may be concerned with paying for students to use Wi-Fi. But at the same time, the school’s also had trouble with repairing and replacing broken computers in the library.

There’s a simple solution. Since no one even uses computer Internet, the school can reduce the number of computers in the library and use the saved costs to cover student Wi-Fi.

It was foolish for the district to eliminate student Wi-Fi in the name of reducing classroom distractions. In the school networks, most inappropriate sites like Facebook are blocked. The ones using Facebook in class have 3G or 4G, and will continue to have it even when Wi-Fi is blocked. Also, Facebook cannot be blocked on 3G or 4G.

If administrators can’t eliminate students using Facebook or Youtube in class by pulling the plug on Wi-Fi, they shouldn’t have done it at all.