Image from the Prince William County Schools main website.As parents, students and staff complained of another internet outage at Prince William County Schools Tuesday, a school official said that it was the result of a larger financial challenge.
Throughout the current school year, there have been several divisionwide outages. According to Prince William County Schools, three to four of these were significant enough to be considered “extended.” Some incidents included phone outages as well.
According to Communications Director Phil Kavits, the problems stem from “critical unmet needs;” the lack of funding to support the school division's growing technology consumption.
“What we are facing are symptoms of a bigger network problem,” said Kavits, who explained the outages are not connected to the division’s new upgraded website.
“More students and more teachers are demanding more information, not just from the website, but from a whole lot of other channels,” Kavits said.
He said that to support the technological use of today’s education system requires updating infrastructure and bandwidth, but doing so requires additional funding.
Kavits described the division's network as "a little bit out of date, a little bit older than they need it to be."
He said to look at it like a series of pipelines, comparing the division's internet network to a local water system connecting homes and businesses to a central source.
“[It's a] combination of all those things; cables- now fiber optics- that go from place to place and from our service providers,” he said, adding, “there are servers where info is stored and processed, and that is a part of it too.”
Specifically, the reasons for the recent internet crashes differ. A combination of firewall configurations and caching servers caused the Sept. 23 outage said Kavits. New proxy servers have already been ordered.
Another outage was caused by a contractor cutting fiber optics.
In recent years, the way in which school divisions interact via technology has grown exponentially. Online testing becomes more prominent, and students tap into WiFi to use their smartphones at school. Student and teachers are downloading large complex files to the network and more information needs to be made available on the division site to keep with best practices.
However, he said the constant flow of information is difficult for the current infrastructure and bandwidth to handle.
“We’ve made some progress in enlarging those pipelines but not to the extent necessary,” Kavits said. “ a lot more demand, still the technology has not changed that dramatically; technology has outpaced what we have been able to replace.”
Kavits notes that Prince William spends approximately $11,000 per student, which is low for the Washington Metro Region. In comparison, Arlington spends approximately $19,000 per student.
Last week, during PWCS's Legislative Breakfast, increased funding for technology was one issue the school division shared with state legislators. Administrators recognized that the technological infrastructure should be updated and hoped the state could help to provide some of that funding.
In the meantime, Kavits explained that PWCS has tried their best to address recent challenges. When school websites are down, they often Robo call parents, so they know schools may not receive their email messages.
Many teachers, students and parents have taken to social media to express such frustrations with the system.
However, Kavits has confidence that teachers can effectively produce lessons with or without the aid of technology. He said teachers are encouraged to have backup plans, not only for technological failures but also for a variety of contingencies.
Kavits said parents can rest assured learning will continue regardless of what tools are available at the teachers’ disposal.
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