By Kara Hallam
Staff Writer
“The Internet finally works!” junior Seema Patel said.
After angrily reloading her page for the past hour, Patel was finally able to conquer the fickle Coppell Independent School District Wireless and work on her in-class assignment.
After a power outage, Coppell High School experienced frustrating technical difficulties. Students and teachers lost one of their most valuable tools; the Internet.
On Sunday around 9 p.m. the Service Center located next to Coppell Middle School West experienced a power shortage. The Service Center, although not near CHS, controls the technological servers for CHS. When the Service Center’s power goes down, CHS’s technology department is met with a couple of hurdles.
With Coppell Servers down, the CHS website by default became temporarily unavailable, and students and parents did not have access to teacher’s links to webpages and other important information such as event updates on the website.
The shutdown of the servers posed all sorts of unique challenges for CISD members.
The recovery process was a delicate one. The servers had to be brought back up in a specific order, and this difficult process lead to spotty internet, especially on the CHS desktop computers.
Students yelled at their computers in frustration while teachers’ lessons were delayed by slow loading links. Some students even searched the school for the best Wi-Fi discovering that it worked best in B hall and C hall, coincidentally the home of two computer labs.
“Teachers emailed us non-stop asking why the Internet was not working and when it would be back up,” CHS technician Patcee Becerra said.
This has not been the first power outage at the Service Center. There are several different causes to them from faulty wires, overheating and one time a car even ran into a pole at the Service Center that was a vital component to the servers.
At a school where every student and teacher has an iPad it can seem almost tragic when the Internet shuts down. Students are left in a great deal of stress without instant access to Facebook or Twitter or possibly actual online school assignments.
